Does assigning another variable to a string make a copy or increase the reference count

Question

On p.35 of \"Python Essential Reference\" by David Beazley, he first states:

For immutable data such as strings, the interpreter aggressively shares

Answer 1

It effectively creates a copy. It doesn't actually create a copy. The main difference between having two copies and having two names share the same value is that, in the latter case, modifications via one name affect the value of the other name. If the value can't be mutated, this difference disappears, so for immutable objects there is little practical consequence to whether the value is copied or not.

There are some corner cases where you can tell the difference between copies and different objects even for immutable types (e.g., by using the id function or the is operator), but these are not useful for Python builtin immutable types (like strings and numbers).