> > Am I so deperately fighting the language? No-one here on the list needs to > set hundreds > variables at once somewhere in their code? I still don't get why: >
I once (and only once) needed hundreds of variables in a program. It was to simplify creation of unit tests, not for production use. The variable names and data (representing a graph with named nodes) was stored in a text file, I read that file and used setattr() to create each variable. This was in a module that did nothing else, and was imported by unit test code that benefited from the names when setting up easily readable test cases. Background if you're new to Python: importing a module *executes* it; for most modules the only important stuff executing is the class and def statements. However, you can execute more stuff when (rarely) necessary -- reading a file in my case. This is very different than, say, C or C++, which has separate include and execute steps. In general, you want to either use the built-in lists and dicts, or create classes/objects to represent hundreds of things. Brian. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
