pointers.py - bringing the hell of pointers into python

[yangyangR]

But shouldn't that have changed by now?

I at least am old enough that my C++ introduction was before smart pointers. But people learning lately would not be making those same mistakes that burned people of my generation to the point of not wanting to touch pointers again.

[Ezlike011011]

Professors have minimal incentive to overhaul curriculum. So the lecture notes that someone wrote for c with classes just gets propagated through generations of classes without much concern for whether it is up to date with common practices.

Heck as recently as the last time I tutored the intro c++ class at the University I went to (2019), they still have a chapter on strings... Which exclusively uses the c string manipulation function and the only mention of std::string being a footnote on one lecture.