> they may eventually be expected to write code for a hashmap in C or some other low-level language as part of a data structures or algorithms class (...)
> This may simply be a preview.
No, this is it as far as the core units go.
This is the first course on data structures and algorithms.
There is a second year course that deals with further data structures and algorithms: we teach amortized performance, proofs by induction, some randomized data structures (skip lists and maybe another), different tree-based structures (I remember red-black trees and patricia trees), some graph search algorithms and a bit more than I forget now. And currently we are doing it in Python for the first unit, and in any language that the student and their tutor can agree on for the second unit.
Remember: these are just class exercises, not real implementations. Of course nobody is going to write actual functioning data structures in Python[1] and expect them to be usable for general purpose programming[2]. That would be daft!
> This may simply be a preview.
No, this is it as far as the core units go.
This is the first course on data structures and algorithms.
There is a second year course that deals with further data structures and algorithms: we teach amortized performance, proofs by induction, some randomized data structures (skip lists and maybe another), different tree-based structures (I remember red-black trees and patricia trees), some graph search algorithms and a bit more than I forget now. And currently we are doing it in Python for the first unit, and in any language that the student and their tutor can agree on for the second unit.
Remember: these are just class exercises, not real implementations. Of course nobody is going to write actual functioning data structures in Python[1] and expect them to be usable for general purpose programming[2]. That would be daft!
[1] https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy/src/8920909d084ec0d42535b955...
[2] http://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/