[Edu-sig] Pythonic Math must include...

[Gregor Lingl]

kirby urner schrieb:
> Yes thank you I completely agree.  A stash of sieves, plus data mine
> this very archive for our earlier work on this topic.
>
> My only suggestion is you include a generator version e.g.:
>   
At first this seems an attractive idea, but in my opinion the idea of 
sieves is fairly antagonistic
to that of generators.  A sieve  is used  to eliminate  from a given set 
elements that have
not some desired property, while generators  (ideally) create  objects, 
one at atime,  with
that desired property. Drastically: you cannot sieve at first all even 
numbers from an infinite set or
sequence. For educational purposes I'd prefer examples that display a 
single concept in
a small and simple way. :-*  A prime number generater based on some 
different algorithm of
course may be interesting and useful.

To continue work in this area one (or at least me) has to have some 
criteria to judge the solutions.
Clearly it was advantageous if there was some consensus about these 
criteria in the community.

There should be some criteria concerning
(a) the choice of problems and themes,
     e.g. to prefer small problems that expose a single idea  -  or 
rather not ...   etc.,
as well as some
(b) code related criteria, like clarity, conciseness, efficiency, beauty 
(!) etc., ranked according to
their priorities.

Once I had the following idea: there are so many renowned pythonistas in 
the developers
community, many of them also interested to promote Python in the 
educational area (see for
instance the protagonists in Jeffrey Elkners "Introducing Python"). How 
about to ask them
to make a personal donation to the educators and learners: a piece of 
code, 10 to 12 lines
at most, that they individually consider  to  show most convincingly the 
power or the beauty
of programming with Python - or the fun they have with it. Young people 
like role models ;-)

Regrettably I didn't persue that idea further. What do you think of it. 
Ok, the days of the
early pioneers are over, but perhaps it's still worth a try?

Regards,
Gregor




    
> Using Python 3:
>
>   
>>>> g = Primes()
>>>> next(g)
>>>>         
> -1
>   
>>>> next(g)
>>>>         
> ....
>