computer science with python

[David Eppstein]

In article <m3istvtodl.fsf at moroni.pp.asu.edu>,
 David Bear <david.bear at asu.edu> wrote:

> I purchased the OReilly book "Computer Science with Perl" (or
> something similar and found it very fun -- even though I really hate
> Perl.  It made me think that python would be a terrific language to
> demonstrate some key computer science concepts.
> 
> Anyone know if a book has already been done?  I find that many CS
> language concepts are debated/discussed here and have to be careful
> when I look at this group because I become too interested in reading
> all the conceptual stuff rather than getting a specific question
> answered.  Seems this list would provide a good starting point for
> such a book.  I image it could be many volumes...

I don't know about textbooks, but I have been using Python (or at 
least, pseudocode syntax very very similar to Python) in my algorithms 
lectures for the last couple of years -- it turns out to be similar in 
a lot of ways to the pseudocode already used by standard algorithms 
texts such as Cormen et al or Goodrich&Tamassia (specifically in its 
lack of variable declarations and indentation-based blocking).  As part 
of this project I've put a random set of implementations of some of the 
algorithms on a web site http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/python/
This isn't a programming course, I don't expect the students to know or 
even learn Python, but the readability of the language gives me a 
convenient notation for describing algorithms in general.

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science