On Mon, 25 Jun 2007 James Stroud wrote: >Harald Luessen wrote: >> Hi, I am new to python and I miss some understanding of the internals >> of some types and containers. With my C/C++ background I hope to get >> some hints to chose the best data structure for my programs. Here are >> some questions: > >This depends on how you define "best". If you want speed and >optimization, you can use the numpy package built with ATLAS tuned for a >specific machine.
Are there arrays in numpy that can efficiently be used for other things than matrix arithmetic? Are they faster than lists but still easy to use? no_piece = 0 wpawn = 1 ... board[square] = no_piece board[square+8] = pawn ... could be a typical pawn move. >Beyond speed, "best" in the python community usually means "most suited" >from an idiomatic perspective and from the perspective of structure that >lends itself to long term maintainability because [C]python data >structures seem to undergo optimizations in their implementation at each >revision. I like the python way of "best" code. But in this particular question the emphasis was on performance and speed. >Your best bet is probably to forget about implementation and write code >that makes sense. For example, some have suggested a tuple-keyed >dictionary to represent a chess board: > >board = ((c,r) for r in xrange(1, 9) for c in 'abcdefgh') >starting = 'RNBQKBNR' + 'P' * 8 + ' ' * 32 + 'p' * 8 + 'rnbqkbnr' >position = dict(zip(board, starting)) I am not new to board game programming and I am used to an array approach or even bitboards. Therefore the dictionary looks a little bit strange to me. Harald -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
