Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> if you restructure the list somewhat
> d = (
> ('pid', ('Employee ID', 'int')),
> ('name', ('Employee name', 'varchar')),
> ('sal', ('Salary', 'float'))
> )
> you can still loop over the list
> ...
> but you can easily generate an index when you need it:
> index = dict(d)
That's exactly the kind of things I find myself doing too often and what
I was talking about: You are using *two* pretty redundant data
structures, a dictionary and a list/tuple to describe the same thing.
Ok, you can use a trick to automatically create the dictionary from the
tuple, but still it feels somewhat "unnatural" for me. A "ordered
dictionary" would be the more "natural" data structure here.
I also wanted to mention the uglyness in the definition (nested tuples),
but then I understood that even an ordered dictionary would not
eliminate that uglyness, since the curly braces are part of the Python
syntax and cannot be used for creating ordered dictionaries anyway. I
would have to define the ordered dictionary in the very same ugly way:
d = odict(('pid', ('Employee ID', 'int')),
('name', ('Employee name', 'varchar')),
('sal', ('Salary', 'float')))
(Unless the Python syntax would be extend to use double curly braces or
something for ordered dictionaries - but I understand that this is not
an option.)
-- Christoph
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