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

[Peter Chase]

Arthur Siegel wrote:
> 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
>
>
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