What does Python treat as reference types?

All values in Python are references. What you need to worry about is if a type is mutable. The basic numeric and string types, as well as tuple and frozenset are immutable; names that are bound to an object of one of those types can only be rebound, not mutated.

>>> t = 1, 2, 3
>>> t[1] = 42
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment

Leave a Comment