[Tutor] Still confused about Python references/objects

[Bruce Sass]

On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, D-Man wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 03:22:43PM +0100, alan.gauld@bt.com wrote:
> | If you want to teach how computers work the Python
> | is not so good, C is better (assembler better still
> | but just toooo painful :-)
>
> Did you learn x86 assembly?  I learned m68k assembly (required class
> for my major) after Eiffel, C++, Java, and C (ok, so I didn't know
> Java real well, and I had only read through a C tutorial but not
> actually used it) and found it to be quite painful.  The prof then
> spent a day giving an introduction to x86 assembly and its
> architecture.  It looked many times more painful than the m68k was.  I
> remember spending several hours getting 10.0 + 5.0 to yield 15.0 (the
> m68k has no fpu so one lab was to implement IEEE floating point in
> software -- ugh!).

Although I would assert that assembler (or even machine language) is
the best introduction to computing you can get, I would have to
qualify it by saying that x86, m68k, or even Z80 (8-bit), is too much.
Something with a really basic instruction set and few registers, like
the 6502, and a crash course in making data structures out of the
various addressing modes, would let beginners see what is at the basis
of all languages... learning a new language is then a matter of
figuring out how the semantics relate to the basic operations CPUs do.


- Bruce