Yes, I was wondering whether I should add lots of caveats to the above.
I thought that might be the case. When teaching, I guess I can understand the need to avoid "well, technically, this isn't always true". It sounds like the students were having a tough enough time of it already :)
Usually one or two have trouble grasping that "int" would be perfectly adequate in this situation.
The ability to pass around functions at run-time was probably the hardest thing to get my head around when I started with Python, after a history of working in languages where "the compiler knows about types and functions, and the runtime knows about variables and instances".
Cheers, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- http://boredomandlaziness.skystorm.net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list