> On Jun 29, 2017, at 2:21 PM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 6:57 AM, Irv Kalb <i...@furrypants.com> wrote: >> I am wondering if other teachers have run into this. Is this a real >> problem? If so, is there any other way of explaining the concept without >> getting into the underlying details of how a generator works? Do you think >> it would be helpful to use the words "sequence of numbers" rather than >> talking about a list here - or would that be even more confusing to students? >> > > The easiest way is to use the word "collection" for things you iterate > over (rather than the concrete term "list"). So you can loop through > (or iterate over) a collection of explicitly given numbers: >
Thanks to everyone who responded to my question about teaching the range function. I particularly like the ideas of using the words "collection" and "sequence"- those seem to be very clear. In my curriculum, I first go through a in detail discussion of the need for, the syntax of and the usage of lists. Then introduce for loops and explain how to iterate through a list (and I do use a naming convention). At the very end of my discussion of lists and loops, I talk about the additional use of "range". I do not want to go into any details of the underlying implementation of range, I just wanted a way to explain how it could be used in a for statement. (I understand that xrange does the same thing in Python 2 as range in Python 3, but for the sake of simplicity, I do not teach xrange in my Python 2 class.) Thanks for all the comments about range not being a generator - I'll be sure to steer clear of that word in my introductory class. Not sure how this got into a discussion of function calls, etc. Thanks very much, Irv -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
