"Paulo J. Matos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Ben Finney > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm wondering a more fundamental question: What are structures? > > That is, what do *you* mean by that term; without knowing that, an > > answer isn't likely to be meaningful. > > Well, I guess that everyone pretty much gets since it exists in > every other language as struct, or define-structure, or whatever is > the syntax.
Take care with broad sweeping statements about “every other language”, or even “most other languages”. They are usually flat-out wrong: there is a stunning variety of different approaches and concepts in programming languages, with very little common to even a majority of them. So no, the question was entirely honest and not a rhetorical device. > Still, answering your rhetoric question, a structure is way to > gather information by fields and those fields are referenced by > name. Okay, you're talking about ‘struct’ from the C language. That helps answer the question. In Python, the way to do that is with a dict. A class can be used, but is often overkill if one doesn't need customised behaviour. > The fact that python 2.6 has now named tuples is a breath of fresh > air! That works also, but a dict will be more broadly useful; and compatible with any Python version. -- \ “Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as | `\ society is free to use the results.” —Richard Stallman | _o__) | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
