Hi! I am not convinced that Python is all students should learn, but probably for slightly different reasons than mentioned here before. Being exposed to various levels of programming is important, and I would even include assembly for some platform at the lowest level. Helps students appreciate what's going on inside, and makes my job easier when I teach compilers. :-) Having a working knowledge of C is also important. Whether you like it or not, you will probably have to at least read C code in one or the other form for the rest of your life, so you better know how to. Python would be my current language of choice for "prototyping" things, and also for "executable pseudo code" during lectures. It does, however, have one serious drawback in my book: No static type checking. Back in my compiler course, I had to explain a lot of "weird asserts" in my sample code... I believe that students should be exposed to a language with a strict type discipline as well, probably something like Java, Eiffel, or Oberon-2. I'd prefer the latter, just for size reasons, although with Eiffel you could cover more ground (e.g. generics, contracts). Finally, giving students an understanding of modern functional programming through either ML or Haskell seems desirable as well. The whole type inference business provides a nice trade-off between what you have to declare and what the language will help you with anyway. Ideally, I believe students should run into these languages as part of "normal classes", not just in the upper division "Programming Languages" course. That course should be for the really weird stuff, and for comparisons and emphasis on concepts. Having said all that, let me get back to the pointer thing: I think students should be made aware of the fact that "pointers" are a different beast in different languages. Addresses in assembler, mostly addresses in C, not at all addresses in the rest of the languages I listed. Wirth's old "variables whose values are (anonymous) variables" explanation of pointers is much more appropriate at those levels (yes, no variables in Haskell but what the heck), with addresses being one possible implementation for the necessary indirection. Whew, what a rant. Sorry for wasting some bandwidth... :-) Peter -- Peter H. Froehlich []->[!]<-[] http://nil.ics.uci.edu/~phf/ OpenPGP: D465 CBDD D9D2 0D77 C5AF 353E C86C 2AD9 A6E2 309E