Mutability

We say that an object is mutable if its state can change as code is executed. The process of changing an object's state is called mutation. Examples of mutable objects include lists and dictionaries. Examples of objects that are not mutable include tuples and functions.

We have seen how to use the == operator to check if two expressions evaluate to the same values. We now introduce a new comparison operator, is, that checks if two expressions evaluate to the same identities.

Wait, what's the difference? For primitive values, there is no difference:

>>> 2 + 2 == 3 + 1
True
>>> 2 + 2 is 3 + 1
True

This is because all primitives have the same identity under the hood. However, with non-primitive values, such as lists and large numbers, each object has its own identity. That means you can construct two objects that may look exactly the same but have different identities.

>>> large_num1 = 23333333333333333333
>>> large_num2 = 23333333333333333333
>>> large_num1 == large_num2
True
>>> large_num1 is large_num2
False
>>> lst1 = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> lst2 = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> lst1 == lst2
True
>>> lst1 is lst2
False

Here, although the lists referred by lst1 and lst2 have the same contents, they are not the same object. In other words, they are the same in terms of equality, but not in terms of identity.

This is important in the discussion of mutability because when we mutate an object, we simply change its state, not its identity.

>>> lst1 = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> lst2 = lst1
>>> lst1.append(5)
>>> lst2
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
>>> lst1 is lst2
True

You may think of the name in Python as the pointer variable in the C language, and the identity of an object in Python as the address of an object in the C language. In such an analogy:

• assigning an object to a name is similar to assigning the address of this object to a pointer variable,
• the == operator compares whether the two pointed values are the same,
• and is operator compares whether the two pointers are the same.

You can use the built-in function id to fetch the identity of an object, which differs during different runnings of the Python interpreter. In fact, the expression a is b is equivalent to id(a) == id(b).

>>> lst = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> id(lst)
2624875298056 # It's different on your machine
>>> lst.append(5)
>>> id(lst)
2624875298056