[Edu-sig] Python for Fun

[Chris Meyers]

Hi,

 I would like to introduce myself and offer my first posting to the 
group. My name is Chris Meyers and I've been working with Jeff 
Elkner and his Python class at Yorktown High School on the Open 
Book Project. 

I'm working primarily on Python case studies for intermediate 
students. The first 4 (of hopefully a dozen) can be found at 
www.ibiblio.org/cmeyers.

These programs are some of my favorites from many years of 
programming. They are all short, just a page or two but should 
demonstrate good use of recursion and objects with algorithms that 
are a little beyond the ordinary. You will be led to a writeup that 
should explain the code in detail. These 1st 4 are

Logic Circuits. Simulation of logic gates with object classes that 
make good use of inheritance. This study starts with AND, OR, NOT 
gates and builds up to a four-bit binary adder. Several students 
are extending this study at Yorktown. 

Lisp in Python. A study of the classic evalquote mechanism. We end 
up with an interactive lisp similar to interactive python.

Tower of Hanoi. A reworking of the standard algoritm to use objects
sending messages. Includes a classroom exercise where students play 
the objects

User Input. An extension of raw_input and input functions to 
provide a scripting mechanism. Used by Lisp in Python to load 
files.

I've been a programmer for nearly 30 years, and have used a lot of 
languages. I work at the daily newspaper in Eugene Oregon, the 
Register Guard. I found Python about 5 years ago and tried it on a 
text processing project and it worked so well we've never looked 
back. Now 8 people program with it daily, and it is absolutely the 
language of choice for all new projects. The production of our 
internet newspaper is automated with Python code to the extent that 
it requires only about 1.5 hours a day for someone to produce. You 
can see it at www.registerguard.com. We are converting all of our 
old systems on VAX computers to Unix using Python and SQL. 2 years 
ago we converted our circulation system from Cobol to a combination 
of VB, Python, and SQL. The amount of code was reduced a factor of 
six, the system runs well, changes are easy, everyone is happy.

On a personal note, I've really grown to love this language (Thanks 
Guido!!) Lots of reasons, but you all know them and I would be just 
preaching to the choir.

Assuming we get enough students (and I'm getting a lot of interest) 
I'll be teaching a beginning Python class at our community college 
this summer. It's short, only 15 hours. But it will be mostly 
adults and should be interesting to see how far we get. 

Thanks, Chris