[Edu-sig] Python for Algorithms and Data Structures...

[Laurent Pierron]

Hi there...

I'm trying to convince my colleague teachers to teach the science of 
computer programming with Python.

It's not a problem to teach very basic computer programming with Python, 
but the major concurrent is VisualBasic which is more sexy with the 
graphic studio. For my colleagues now teaching basic computer 
programming is point-and-click to draw a nice interface and add some 
magic sentences to   enforce the computer to do something, it's a 
non-sense and give a bad idea to the difficulty to think like a computer 
scientist.

To teach "serious" computer programming (algorithm and data structure) 
there is some problems using Python, in France the course of algorithmic 
contains a large part about pointers (no pointers in Python), about 
Pascal-like record and data types, it's independant of the language but 
very Pascal-oriented.

It's not dfficult to teach Pascal-like record with empty classes.
Data types is just a matter of convention.
But how to introduce pointer with Python, pointer is very important in 
computer science because it's very used in C and C++, and C/C++ are very 
used in computer science ?

-- 
Laurent PIERRON                    -*- mailto:Laurent.Pierron@loria.fr

Ingénieur de développement
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