Immutable vs Mutable types

Question

I\'m confused on what an immutable type is. I know the float object is considered to be immutable, with this type of example from my book:

class         


        

Answer 1

First of all, whether a class has methods or what it's class structure is has nothing to do with mutability.

ints and floats are immutable. If I do

a = 1
a += 5

It points the name a at a 1 somewhere in memory on the first line. On the second line, it looks up that 1, adds 5, gets 6, then points a at that 6 in memory -- it didn't change the 1 to a 6 in any way. The same logic applies to the following examples, using other immutable types:

b = 'some string'
b += 'some other string'
c = ('some', 'tuple')
c += ('some', 'other', 'tuple')

For mutable types, I can do thing that actallly change the value where it's stored in memory. With:

d = [1, 2, 3]

I've created a list of the locations of 1, 2, and 3 in memory. If I then do

e = d

I just point e to the same list d points at. I can then do:

e += [4, 5]

And the list that both e and d points at will be updated to also have the locations of 4 and 5 in memory.

If I go back to an immutable type and do that with a tuple:

f = (1, 2, 3)
g = f
g += (4, 5)

Then f still only points to the original tuple -- you've pointed g at an entirely new tuple.

Now, with your example of

class SortedKeyDict(dict):
    def __new__(cls, val):
        return dict.__new__(cls, val.clear())

Where you pass

d = (('zheng-cai', 67), ('hui-jun', 68),('xin-yi', 2))

(which is a tuple of tuples) as val, you're getting an error because tuples don't have a .clear() method -- you'd have to pass dict(d) as val for it to work, in which case you'll get an empty SortedKeyDict as a result.