Lie Ryan wrote:
You need to adjust the current mindset slightly (but in an important way to understand the "why" behind this idea). The current notion is: list and dict is a data structure. With this idea, list and dict is an abstract type, not a data structure. array, linked list, binary tree, red- black tree, hashed are data structure.
Did you miss my earlier post? Python already has about 20 abstract types. It has a naming scheme for these, as well for concrete structures, both built-in and imported. Agitating for names to be swapped around is a waste of time. You are free, however, to do this in your own code.
> We create a data structure by
passing the data structure's identifier string to a factory function provided by the abstract type.
Python is object-oriented rather than name-oriented. When one knows the name of an object at compile time, the Python way is to use it directly in the code, unquoted. In other words, work with and pass around objects as much as possible and only use names when they are truly variable and not known constants.
What you propose is equivalent to using getattr for all attribute access: "getattr(list, 'append')" versus "list.append".
Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
