[Edu-sig] modeling the rational numbers

[Atanas Radenski]

Quoting Michel Paul <mpaul at bhusd.k12.ca.us>:

> This is simply a Python module that blends text and code.

This is a good illustration that Python is a particularly suitable  
language for literate programming  
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming).

> The goal here is to create something that would be of value to both   
> math and programming students.

Yes, indeed, this kind of texts can be beneficial for both math  
students and programming students.

Returning back to my years as a *programming* student, I think I would  
have been excited about the potential of lazy evaluation  
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation) in Python.

Years ago I implemented an implicit lazy evaluation interpreter for  
John Backus' FP language, but because it was the *only* evaluation  
mode for all sequences, it made the whole interpreter too slow.  
Python's lazy evaluation is explicit and hence employed only as  
needed, and obviously it does not impose unacceptable performance  
penalties.

Returning back to my years as a *math* student, Michel's example would  
have helped me to understand the potential of Python as a tool for  
modeling of interesting math concepts (in contrast to the widespread  
view to programming languages as number-crunching tools).

Great writing, Michel. I hope that you can post more like this.

Atanas

-- 
Atanas Radenski
mailto:radenski at studypack.com   http://studypack.com
mailto:radenski at chapman.edu     http://www1.chapman.edu/~radenski