Understanding Object Copying in Python

My Initial Struggle with List Copying

When I began my programming journey in Python, I encountered a scenario that many new programmers face: copying a list and passing it to a function for further modification. Here's the approach I initially used and why it didn't work as expected.

def square_nums(nums_list):
  ...

original_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

copied_list = original_list

squared_nums = square_nums(copied_list)

However, I soon realized a critical issue: any modifications made to copied_list within the function were …

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