Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 10:30 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> Chris, I hardly think Jim's last statement (which I presume is your target)
> is egregious enough to start another junk subthread of 9 (now 10) posts.
> Certainly '[citation needed]' is a pretty senseless comment. 'Citation' to
> what, for what? It is well-known that Windows uses 2-byte words for unicode
> coding. If you want a citation for that fact, find it yourself.
>
> What is not clear to me is whether Windows internally uses UCS-2, which only
> codes BMP chars, and which would *not* be excellent, or UTF-16, which covers
> all chars by using surrogates. I will guess the latter. More to the point,
> even if MS uses a complete coding scheme internally (UFT-16), it does not,
> as far as I know, make it fully available and usable to *me*, as I showed in
> my response about code page 65001.

And what I'm more asking for is a clarification on how Win 7 is
different from the previous Windowses. I know a lot did change from XP
to 7 (I don't care which side of Vista the change happened, let's just
compare the popular Windows with the popular Windows here), but I
wasn't aware that anything to do with Unicode had changed there. Since
jmf made the assertion in words which implied that Microsoft had now
*and only now* produced such a system, I asked for a citation.

ChrisA