On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 1:20 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: > Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com>: > >> On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 9:29 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: >>> Thus "x and y are identical" *means* "x is y" and nothing else. >> >> This notion of identity sounds useless, and if that is the way you >> prefer to understand it then you can safely ignore that it exists. I >> think that most users though inherently understand the concept of >> objects being distinct or identical and see the value in being able to >> test for this. > > It is not useless to identify your fundamental definitions and axioms > instead of resorting to circular reasoning. > > The original question was how a beginning programmer could "get" lists. > We very quickly descended into the murky waters of "objects" of an > underlying machine and CPython's way of implementing things. I was > wondering if there was a way to "get" integers, lists, references etc > without hauling the poor student under the keel. > > In a word, could Python be your first programming language?
Absolutely, many people learn Python as their first language. Even MIT famously uses it for their introductory computer science class. And I think that most of them do it without getting into internal details like memory addresses and the heap. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list