---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Peter Doyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sep 20, 2007 9:04 AM Subject: Re: [sage-devel] Regarding range and '..' operator To: William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi William, I am glad you have not abandoned your suggestion of introducing the 1..10 notation, which I think is absolutely brilliant. I am new to Python, and while I am not 100% keen on it, I do appreciate the clean, simple syntax. From long experience using computers in undergrad courses, I understand that there are great benefits to being able to tell at a glance what a (simple) program is supposed to do. Unless programming is the subject of the course, there is no time to spare for semicolons and underscores. if I want students to be able to modify existing programs, and write simple programs of their own, the language has to be simple, in a way that Python mostly is. If I'm going to use SAGE in a probability course, it will be a huge advantage to have this simple, crystal clear syntax for loops, conditionals, function definitions. Students are going to know at a glance how simple demo programs work. Except for the problem with range(). But if I can write for i in 1..10 instead of for i in xrange(1,11) then we'll be golden. Well, until we crash into other peculiarities of Python, like the way I can accidentally redefine the default value of a list argument, or otherwise accidentally modifiy an argument passed by reference. But that's way down the road, and we'll likely not run into that in a probability course or a calculus course. Cheers, Peter Cheers, Peter -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
