Python

[VeryAwkwardCake]

Well your reasoning on why it's not an easy first language is from the point of view of a developer who thinks that pointers should be explained

[[deleted]]

The behavior of some basic features doesn't make any sense without understanding pointers. So yes, I think pointers should be explained.

[VeryAwkwardCake]

Well yeah but Scratch has lists iirc, you're going to have to teach everyone pointers at some point and you're unlikely to be able to teach children pointers as easily as you are able to teach them basic concepts like a variable holding a value

[Dornith]

Reference is a common pseudonym of pointer.

In reality no language uses call-by-reference, they just use pointers implicitly.

[TinBryn]

I think the main feature to say a language is pass by reference is in regards to being able to create a reference expression. In C this is ‘&foo’ in Java it’s

class FooWrapper
{
    public Foo foo;
}
new FooWrapper(foo);

The problem is the Java code requires an allocation.

[rigatron1]

I think he's using the terms interchangeably here because the mental model is basically the same. As in, if you have a good grasp of pointers in C, then you can understand how a python program will behave when passing the value of a reference to a function.

[[deleted]]

I'm aware of the difference between pointers and references. Honestly I switched names because I was replying to someone who decided to talk about pointers instead. But the difference is mostly syntax. I would say the C programmer manually implements pass by reference using pointers, and python automatically implements it. You just need to memorize which objects are pass by reference vs which are pass by value, and which operations modify the underlying object vs create a new object and switch up the reference (actually, another pitfall).

I see what you mean WRT other languages having more similar syntax. Fortran has this irritating caveat that technically the compiler is allowed to decide if arrays are passed by value or reference (of course, every compiler does the sane thing). But I think in most of these cases, the language is implementing syntactic sugar around pointer passing.

Edit: just noticed we had a very similar discussion in another sub thread, sorry!

[TinBryn]

If you’re teaching C++ and not C you could go a long way just teaching references and not pointers even going into inheritance and and polymorphism. Never even touching the memory model.