On Jan 9, 6:52 am, Paddy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 9, 2:19 am, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > > > Greetings Pythoneers -- > > > Some of us over on edu-sig, one of the community actives, > > have been brainstorming around this Rich Data Structures > > idea, by which we mean Python data structures already > > populated with non-trivial data about various topics such > > as: periodic table (proton, neutron counts); Monty Python > > skit titles; some set of cities (lat, long coordinates); types > > of sushi. > > > Obviously some of these require levels of nesting, say > > lists within dictionaries, more depth of required. > > > Our motivation in collecting these repositories is to give > > students of Python more immediate access to meaningful > > data, not just meaningful programs. Sometimes all it takes > > to win converts, to computers in general, is to demonstrate > > their capacity to handle gobs of data adroitly. Too often, > > a textbook will only provide trivial examples, which in the > > print medium is all that makes sense. > > > Some have offered XML repositories, which I can well > > understand, but in this case we're looking specifically for > > legal Python modules (py files), although they don't have > > to be Latin-1 (e.g. the sushi types file might not have a > > lot of romanji). > > > If you have any examples you'd like to email me about, > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a good address. > > > Here's my little contribution to the > > mix:http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/python/gis.py > > > Kirby Urner > > 4D Solutions > > Silicon Forest > > Oregon > > I would think there was more data out there formatted as Lisp S- > expressions than Python data-structures. > Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on 'wrapping' XML and CSV data- > sources? > > - Paddy.
The more I think on it the more I am against this- data should be stored in programming language agnostic forms but which are easily made available to a large range of programming languages. If the format is easily parsed by AWK then it is usually easy to parse in a range of programming languages. - Paddy. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
