... I just want to limit the students' ability to shoot themselves (and each other) in the foot ...

A properly structured and maintained System Administrator/User system should prevent students shooting others in the foot, and shooting yourself in the foot is a learning experience!

... and also limit their access to cheat by taking liberties with namespaces and object innards.

But "cheating" and "taking liberties" (also known as "playing") are part of the fun of learning — and often a royal road to enlightenment. All too soon will your students enter an academic or commercial environment (whether or not they seek to become professional programmers or engineers) in which Someone will constantly be watching over their shoulders to make sure they don't "take liberties." For now, let them have a chance to enjoy learning.

So don't bother. Just set up effective user firewalls, give them Perl, let them go nuts. You may be quite pleasantly surprised!

(I'm assuming the kids are about 10 years and up. Younger than that, something like jfroebe's suggestion may be more appropriate than Perl.)

In reply to Re: Subset of Perl language by AnomalousMonk
in thread Subset of Perl language by wanna_code_perl

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.