I'm for the moment writing two classes. A table, which is like a list, but can start at any integer.
A tree which is like a dictionary, but will iterate over the keys in sorted order. The problem is that I would like to implemet slices but, that seems to be impossible with how slices are implemented now. I wrote the following class to test things out. class Tst: def __getitem__(self, key): print key then I called the interpreter and got this: >>> from tst import Tst >>> t=Tst() >>> t[:] slice(0, 2147483647, None) >>> t[:9] slice(0, 9, None) >>> t[:'ok'] slice(None, 'ok', None) >>> t['ok':] slice('ok', None, None) >>> t[6:] slice(6, 2147483647, None) >>> t[1,2] (1, 2) >>> t[1,2:] (1, slice(2, None, None)) >>> t[(1,2):] slice((1, 2), None, None) Now suppose tab is a table with indexes from -5 to 12. tab[:4] would have to make a table ranging from -5 to 4 tab[0:4] would have to make a table ranging from 0 to 4. But each time I would be given the same argument, being slice(0, 4, None). So I would be unable to distinghuish between the two. I don't think it very likely but I could have a table with indexes from 2147483647 to 2147483700, so having 2147483647 as value that indicated till the end of the sequence is a bit awkward. The same problems occur when I have a tree with integer key values. But even if I don't use integers as keys I have a problem with what is returned since None is a valid key and thus it shouldn't be used this way. -- Antoon Pardon -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list