Talk:Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 3/Who Goes There?

this stuff is complicated

Difference between + variable and, variable
Hi,

I was wondering if someone could explain, maybe in the text, the difference between these two different statement, which seemingly produce the same result:

Compared with:

Difference being: print("You may pass", user_input) compared with print("You may pass," + user_input)
 * The difference is that one prints out a "," between pass and user_input, and the other prints out a space " " Python puts a space between the arguments (or parameters) in print. Jrincayc (talk) 17:17, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Quotation marks
Is there a reason for the (" and ') at the end of this sentence? I am totally new to programming and python, so I don't want to delete it if it is serving some function that I am missing. Remember that variables are used to store a value in, they do not use quotation marks (" and ')
 * I think the author is just itemising the single (') and double quotes (") - these are the quotation marks. Recent Runes (discuss • contribs) 01:14, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Pointers
I think when teaching python it should be emphasized that python's variables are all pointers. They are not boxes. They are labels assigned to things. If a thing hasn't got labels anymore, it is lost. I remember when I couldn't figure out why a list isn't copied when I assign it to a new variable. And even after that it took me a long time to start thinking the right way. I think there should also be an example that shows that the variable is not needed in the first piece of code because variables are complicated.