Newbie : checking semantics

[rbt]

Stefan Nobis wrote:
> rbt <rbt at athop1.ath.vt.edu> writes:
> 
> 
>>True beginners (no programming experience whatsoever) don't have
>>to deal with unlearning stuff such as the bracket plague.
> 
> 
> That's true. But they also not very used to give nothing (->
> whitespace) a meaning. I teached quite some beginners and most of
> them had problems to get the indentation right.
> 
> At least in the very beginning IMHO it would be useful to
> explicitly end a block with some kind of an end statement.

You have a very good point. Understanding the flow of a program and the 
indentation or brackets that go with logical blocks of code would be 
difficult for those who have never had to think like a programmer before 
to grasp.

Have you read the book titled, "How to think like a Computer Scientist"? 
It's very good for true beginners and it's free. It uses Python too. 
It's good at teaching scope and how to recognize blocks of code.

> 
> Meaningful whitespache is not a big problem (as many people seems
> to think) but it's also not very obvious and sometimes it causes
> at least a little bit trouble.
>