[Discuss] Functional programming @ UVic (was 'C' string tokenizer for those who hate strtok)

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2006-07-02 17:46-0700 stephen hawkes wrote:

> As much as I love perl, I really think it would make a horrible first 
> language (imagine the mess students would make with that). How about python 
> though? I think I remember Corless stating that he thought it was a good 
> language for teaching.

I believe that was one of the original motivations of Guido van Rossum,
Python's creator.  His Computer Programming for Everybody proposal is dead
through lack of funding, but there are a number of interesting spin-offs,
see http://www.python.org/cp4e/ .

If you do a google search for (python teaching language) there are many
hits. For the ones I sampled, the universal point seemed to be that python
was a great first language to teach, but go read the results of that
google search for yourself.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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