[Edu-sig] mentions of Py on Math Forum....

[kirby urner]

OK, took your advice.

Turns out I was thinking of OrdererdDict added to collections in 2.7
(?), now used more routinely for some return types.

An ordered dictionary doesn't support indexing but does remember the
order in which items were inserted, is prepared to divulge such items
in either LIFO or FIFO depending on popitems "last" parameter).

Kwel.

Such a rich set of data structures, hard to see why any CS0/CS1 would
start with say Java, but then it's not either/or.  As mentioned, my
Princeton intro to computer programming was smorgasbord/sampler (10
languages in 10 weeks or something like that, not that you learn any
really well, although I got pretty good at APL on my own time).

But if you're going to pick just one for a long slog, why not Python?
The high schools are doing it (the good ones), why not colleges too?

Kirby


On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 2:00 PM, Scott David
Daniels<Scott.Daniels at acm.org> wrote:
> kirby urner wrote:
>>
>> I haven't tried 3.1 yet, have been using dictionary versus list to
>> harp on the cardinality vs. ordinality distinction (per Midhat
>> Gazale), understand there's a "new kind of dictionary" that has
>> ordinal properties....
>
> You really should.  The io module went to C, so simple file I/O is
> substantially faster.  It had been slowed down to make sure the
> semantics were all correct for where the Unicode and where the bytes
> should be.  There will be no fixes to the 3.0 line, 3.1 is the
> ongoing Python 3.* version (3.1 was a quick follow-on to address
> issues discovered in the 3.0 release (think if 3.0 as a Python 3000
> alpha or beta).
>
> --Scott David Daniels
> Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org
>
>
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