[Edu-sig] The power of interactivity

[Prasan Samtani]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arthur" <ajsiegel at optonline.net>
To: "'Prasan Samtani'" <samtani at ISI.EDU>; <edu-sig at python.org>
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 4:14 AM
Subject: RE: [Edu-sig] The power of interactivity



> Are you aware of the Boost libraries for writing Python extensions in C++?
>
> http://www.boost.org/libs/python/doc/
>
> The beauty being that bindings created with Boost allow C++ classes to be
> inheritable and extendible in Python, rather than just scripted by Python.

I've used boost::python, and I like enough to use it at work. However, for
the classroom, I'm using Python as a model for scripting languages, and I
think that understanding the idea of 'extension' by hand-coding some
bindings would be useful (we could of course require the bindings to be
hand-written as a homework ass., and then recommend they use boost::python
for the final project).

> VPython - which is a 3d library - uses Boost in its "experimental" 3.0
> version.
>
> http://www.vpython.org/linux_download.html
>
> Why not get your students pitching in on the continuing development of
> VPython?

Thanks for the link. However, once again, for the classroom, we'd still like
them to understand how games are built (including some of the nuts and bolts
that are already implemented in VPython) from the ground up. Thanks again,
Arthur.