[Edu-sig] The fate of raw_input() in Python 3000

[Arthur Siegel]

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 21:36 -0500, John Zelle wrote:

> It may not be on that scale, but it would certainly cause me to survey the 
> language landscape again to see if there are better languages for teaching. 


On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:45 -0500, Peter Chase wrote:
> If you want to expose your students to the full horror of a 
> syntactically complete language, why not switch to C++, where you can 
> run programs in the compiler?  

On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:54 -0500, Brad Miller wrote:
> Its hard to say for sure, but if I had seen that in order to get
> user  
> input I had to import sys and explain to students who are seeing  
> their first programming language what sys.stdin was all about.... I  
> don't think I would have explored Python much further.
> 
> 
On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:50 -0700, Radenski, Atanas wrote:
> Me too :-) I would like to see both input and raw_input preserved.
> Replacing these with more complicated (from pedagogical perspective)
> methods would probably give an additional reason for educators to look
> at alternative languages, such as Ruby. 
*
Being dispassionate on the issue itself - I have *never* used
raw_input() and, as it happens, I am generally literate enough at this
point so that the intentions of sys.stdin.readline is *clearer* to me
than is raw_input() - I am disturbed by the tone of the discussion.

Guess I prefer the all-in-the-family temper tantrum, then the calm and
dispassionate threat - explicit or implicit.

I guess I view it also as an example of the result of Python promoting
itself to the educational community in the wrong way, and on the wrong
footing, from day one - as the easy alternative, rather then as the
literate and productive alternative, the *best* alternative for getting
a certain class of problems solved in the least circuitous way.

In particular, the kinds of real world problems a student might want to
solve or explore.

Since sys.stdin.readline seems to me *more* literate, I'm OK with it.

And will maintain my apparently cloistered, unreal world view of how a
motivated student might want most to be approached, and her fragility.

Art