Hello, well, I thought that self-referential and circular meant the same thing in this context -- maybe because the translations into my native language mean the same thing. At least to create a circular data structure without using assignments and on non-hypothetical hardware, you have to know the address of an object in memory before it is initialized. This is, of course, possible, especially if allocation and initialization are performed in logically separate steps, but it also is uncommon. I have never seen any code that does this, so far. So you're right that my statement was not absolutely precise, but it still holds in practice. cu, Thomas <blockquote>On Mar 5, 2009 9:10 PM, "Marco Morazan" <<a href="mailto:morazanm@gmail.com">morazanm@gmail.com</a>> wrote: On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Thomas Chust <<a href="mailto:chust@web.de">chust@web.de</a>> wrote: > Hello Aditya, > > self-referent...Do you mean circular data structures? Even those, under some parameter passing conventions, can be created without mutation/assignment. -- Cheers, Marco </blockquote>