About integer objects vs integer values

[Gribouillis]

i'm curious why internal details matter to you.

Anyone who has written a few extension modules by using the CPython's C API is interested in internal details and in reference counts. I know that garbage collection in general doesn't need reference counts, there may exist implementations of python that don't use it. In any case, the assignment statement doesn't copy python objects. It only assigns a pointer value to an existing instance.