On Nov 27, 10:06 am, hdante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Nov 25, 5:31 pm, none <""atavory\"@(none)"> wrote: .... > And that's it. I think that there is confusion because everything we > do with python variables are pointer dereferences, except for the > attribution, that instead of dereferencing and operating the object, > just changes the pointer. The scope is just a matter of using > automatic memory management or not.
I hope the participants in this thread realize that this sort of discussion will cause any programming newbie to immediately melt into the floor. I would try to avoid talking in generalities about python variables versus C or lisp or whatever, unless I was teaching an upper division college programming languages survey class. Instead, I'd fire up the interactive interpreter and illustrate how things work via examples, avoiding the weird cases at all costs. If they ask about the relationship to C or java or whatever I would encourage them to not worry about it, and only go deeper if pressed. BTW, at the moment I'm "facilitating" an online C# class for fun and a very little profit in my spare time. I'm becoming quite convinced that especially the beginning programmers would have far less difficulty with Python, largely because there is less syntactic noise to confuse them and because they can fiddle around with everything up to and including advanced concepts using simple examples at the interactive prompt. But if you talk like the above to them, they will run for the hills... (no offense intended). -- Aaron Watters === http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FREETEXT=evil+fish -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list