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The Missing Manual? (Re: Finding Python help...)

Greg Ewing (using news.cis.dfn.de) ckea25d02 at sneakemail.com
Mon Mar 31 19:28:53 EST 2003 
James Kew wrote:
> I too found this enormously frustrating when I was learning Python: lists
> are fundamental... It seems
> counterintuitive that they be documented in the Library Reference

I think this is bad, too. I can see the reasoning behind
putting them there, but I don't entirely agree with it.
To me, the term "library" suggests a collection of things
that could, in principle, be taken away and the core
would continue to function. But there's no way you could
take away things like lists, tuples and dicts, because
the interpreter actually *uses* them internally. Plus
there is special syntax in the language for constructing
them, which makes them even more special.

Maybe there should be a THIRD manual, called something like
"Built-in Objects Reference". Or maybe even "Built-in Objects
and Functions Reference", since the builtin functions seem
pretty fundamental as well, and not something you'd
intuitively expect to find in a "library".

Also, there ought to be a very thorough tutorial that
systematically works its way through everything in the
Language Reference and Built-in Objects and Functions
Reference, but in "tutorial order" rather than "reference
manual order". (But no, I'm not volunteering to write
it!-)

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg
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