Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language

[wxjmfauth at gmail.com]

Le jeudi 12 décembre 2013 18:55:15 UTC+1, Terry Reedy a écrit :
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> If you mean cp65xxx (I forget exact numbers), MS Command Prompt fails, 
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> not Python. One should not use any other code page, but only other code 
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> pages work.
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Please, do not exaggerate too much.
On my win7 box, using cp65001:

The golang works. Despite my poor knowledge with with
this language, I even relatively quickly succeded to write
a "readline" fct.

Ruby 2 works.

irb, the interactive ruby works. I remember to have had
some diffuculties in entering some chars, this a different
problem.

echo "unicode" works.

xelatex (my favourite tool), a tex-unicode engine, works.
I'm usualy using a GUI tool, I just tested with a "éàü.tex"
document. Indeed, it works.

Starting that created document "éàü.pdf" with the cmd
> start éàü.pdf
works. It calls Acrobat Reader.

Starting that created document with Sumatra, a pdf viewer
works.

Not directly related to my comment, I can compile a
.tex document in such a dir
> D:\jm\Москва\Zürich\Αθήνα\œdipe
and it works.

Something a little bit different. Neil Hodgson's SciTE
editor. One can configure the output pane to use 65001.
All the examples above works. It is also possible to 
make Python working, but I had to write my own "printing
material".

A note about font. The console does not, and is not able,
to display all the "chars". It is however always displaying
text very smoothly and correctly using the replacement *glyph".
Nothing to do with an "incorrect behaviour" of the console.

Eg:
> echo "ሴé€㑖Ѓ⌴*"
works.

I mainly considered BMP "characters".

Windows is not so bad. One can discuss ad nauseam
the pros and cons of console-gui application. I have
always considered Windows as a system which use gui
applications. And even with Python using a gui toolkit,
I sometimes "link" my own created "gui console".

I do not wish to defend MS. What I wrote depends
on the Windows version, XP, Vista, Windows 7. 
One should recognize, with win7, MS, finally, produce
a full unicode system. Strangely, among all the "bashing"
one can read about that system, this is rarely mentioned.
(With an excellent unicode coding scheme!)

jmf