list vs tuple

Tim Peters tim.one at home.com
Sun Apr 1 15:54:12 EDT 2001


[/F]
> done lots of Python training lately?  in my experience, *everyone*
> can understand Python's object model in about five minutes.

[deadmeat]
> Do the first 5 minutes of the tutorial mention this? No.. so the
> newcomer to Python will go off thinking one thing, and not know
> any better until s/he gets to the relevant section.

There is a dilemma here nobody has solved.  As I said before, the
expectations you *come* with depend on your background, and not everybody
comes from Pascal.  People coming from Java would merely get bored if they
had to suffer through a long-winded explanation of what's already "obvious"
to them.  If the tutorial spelled out everything that may violate *someone's*
preconceptions, it's an open question whether it would ever get around to
showing something interesting about *Python* -- but the latter is its primary
job.  So it generally doesn't try.

You could help by writing a "Python for Pascalers" intro blurb.  A fine model
is Peter Norvig's excellent "Python for Lisp Programmers", at

    http://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html

You'll note that he doesn't mention *your* particular confusion, because it's
not one Lisp people are likely to suffer.  OTOH, he mentions lots of things
that you won't think need mentioning at all (for example, it would never
occur to you to question whether list[i] is constant-time or takes time
proportional to i, but people coming from Lisp have indeed complained that
the tutorial doesn't cover *that* right at the start!).  It's a matter of
background, not of Objective Truth.

the-only-objective-truth-is-that-all-other-languages-suck<wink>-ly
    y'rs  - tim





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