Immutable vs Mutable Objects

00:00 There are two types of objects in Python: immutable ones and mutable ones. Simply put, a mutable object can have its values changed, or mutated,

00:13 after it’s been created. The object in memory can be edited directly instead of having to create a new copy of the object with the desired changes. Take, for example, the list. You can create a list of elements and then, later on, change one of them without having to recreate the whole list in memory.

00:37 This is not the case for other types of objects, for example, the Python string. The string type is immutable because, in order to mutate it, Python will have to create a whole new string object under the hood.

00:52 This is why many string functions built into the standard library return a copy of the modified string. Why the string is immutable, and the list mutable, is a design choice that’s beyond the scope of this course.

01:07 So it’s best just to learn what types are mutable and which are immutable. This table sums it up. On the left, you can see the type, and on the right, whether or not it is immutable.

01:21 As you can see, a bunch of types are immutable. The only ones capable of mutation after they’ve been created are the list, set, and dictionary. To show this in action, we can use the Python interactive shell.

01:37 The built-in id function will return the address of an object in memory. I’m going to start by defining a new variable x, just like this.

01:49 If I pass this into the id function, we’ll see its memory address. These are normally represented in hexadecimal format, but the id function shows us the address in decimal format.

02:02 Let’s change the value of x. I’ll increment it by one.

02:09 Good. It looks like x is 6. Let’s see its memory address.

02:16 If you look carefully at the end of the address, you can see that it’s different. That’s because the integer type is immutable. Python wasn’t able to change the value of x directly, so it created a new space in memory for a new x value of 6, then changed our variable to point to that space in memory.

02:39 This applies to strings too, because they’re also an immutable type. I’ll start by defining a new string called name. And now, if we try to change the first character like this, we’ll get a TypeError.

02:56 It says, “string object does not support item assignment.” Let’s try doing the same thing with a list of integers.

03:10 Here’s its memory address. All good, so far. Now, I’m going to call the append method on this list to add one more element.

03:21 There’s the new integer. And if I get its id, you’ll see that it’s the same as it was before. That’s because the list type is mutable, so Python could change it without having to create a whole new list object in memory. In the next video, you’ll learn more about how Python variables work under the hood.