bnmnetp

Great idea. In other parts of the book we discuss how Python implements lists and other data structures, so that would fit in nicely with that theme.

Good point. Although we do introduce the long way first.

The reason we don't use a,b = b,a in our code is that it isn't very portable to other languages. We wrote this book as a second semester textbook. So most students are not very good programmers and will be transitioning to something like Java or C++ in the next semester.

Further, for most of the sorting algorithms we have exercises where we suggest that users modify the code themselves to use simultaneous assignment.

Thanks, I enjoy working on all aspects of this project. For anyone interested in helping us out you can find us on github.com/bnmnetp/runestone. I would love to have more contributors.

Thanks for the comments. I'm one of the authors of the book (Miller). Although I wouldn't say that the ADTs are strict ports from Java, I would say that because we teach Java in our next class that was definitely in the back of our heads. Now that we are online, I could definitely see moving in the direction you suggest to make this interesting to a wider audience.