This is true in some circumstances but not in general. Consider how integers are represented in Emacs Lisp, OCaml, or Smalltalk. They're unboxed, but boxing t

This is true in some circumstances but not in general. Consider how integers are represented in Emacs Lisp, OCaml, or Smalltalk. They're unboxed, but boxing them like CPython does wouldn't change their semantics, so it doesn't seem correct to say that it would change their type. And there's no way in the language to box them. Fundamentally, boxing is a question about implementation, not semantics. I think a more generally correct statement would be: > An unboxed value can be held in CPU registers directly, while a boxed value is referenced through a memory address where the actual value is found.