Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 11:53 PM, Dave Angel <davea at davea.name> wrote:
> Funny you should say that in the middle of a discussion about lifetime.  In
> C, when you do the -> thing, you're now in a different struct with a
> potentially different lifetime.  If p is a local,  with auto lifetime,  then
> so is p.x
>
> So, although the two are mutually exclusive,  there's valuable information
> hidden in the required choice.

Sure, but you can figure out whether p is a local struct or a local
pointer to some other struct by looking at its declaration. Do you
also need to look at every usage of it? We don't adorn every / with a
marker saying whether we're dividing ints or floats, and that's
something that could be potentially useful (float division of two ints
being what Py3 does). Why adorn pointer usage?

ChrisA