Ned Batchelder <n...@nedbatchelder.com>: > On 2/14/14 4:43 PM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > Yes, sometimes for teaching reasons, you have to over-simplify or even > introduce artificial constructs. I'd recommend acknowledging them as > such. > > When you say, "There are two fundamentally different kinds of values > in Python," or "So we have four kinds of (memory) slots," you aren't > letting on that this is a teaching construct. It sounds like you mean > that this is how Python actually works. > > I'd use words like, "This is an oversimplification, but might > help...", or "You can think of it like ...".
Strictly speaking, I'm not simplifying, but giving an equivalent, alternative description. I admit that the word "fundamentally" was a bad choice. I'm not even sure my description was a good illustration. I definitely was not referring to CPython and was trying to keep the discussion separate from the implementation of the day. BTW, I also wasn't oversimplifying, but complicating by bringing in an unnecessary dichotomy. The challenge is how to present Python's value model in the most digestible way. For example, how is a beginnger to understand what's going on in: n += 1 Is it easier to think that the number held by the variable n is incremented by 1, or is it easier to understand it orthodoxly through instantiations and references? Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
