[phodge]

> Most programming languages pass function parameters by value

The biggest irony here is that if you wrote your code in C instead, you would actually pass more arguments by reference than in equivalent python, because you're going to use pointers for everything but primitive integer values.

[Koshkin]

No, the biggest irony is that C as a language does not even have a syntax for passing by reference. Everything, including pointers, is passed by value. References were introduced in C++.