On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 3:22 AM, rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > The problem is that python is an imperative language and uses the '=' sign > for assignment. In math of course '=' stands for equality.
Pascal tried to create a new operator, := to be read "becomes", to deal with the whole equality-vs-assignment issue. Did it really help anything? I don't think so. Just syntactic salt. Even the comparison isn't really mathematical - in maths, "x = y" is a statement of truth, whereas in programming, it's a question ("is x equal to y"). Teaching maths and programming at once is like teaching any other two arts at once - there'll be differences to grok as well as similarities to jump on. I would say that the expression evaluator in (almost) any modern language is a fairly close parallel to standard mathematical expressions; yes, abutting tokens is multiplication in algebra, but on the flip side, we don't use (or need) subscript to make multi-letter identifiers in code. Programming uses more words and less blackboard notations (compare abs(x) to |x| for example), but it's expressing things in fairly similar ways most of the time. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list