Hi All, I am fairly new to Python (less than a week). My goal is to write a small prototype of a database. Rather than build it using the typical method where one provides selection, projection, aggregation, union, intersection, etc. functions, I would like to do it in a more 'functional' style (executing a database query by using map, reduce, filter, etc. I am curious what the best way is to work with a list of tuples. For example, if I have the following list: [('a',1),('a',1),('a',3),('b',1),('b',2),('c',2),('c',3),('c',4)] how do I apply a map to each item in each tuple in the list? What if I want to filter based on both elements (the number AND the letter)?
The most obvious solution is just to provide a function or a lambda expression whcih does what I want. However, since this is, eventually, going to be a database, the user will decide at run time what functions and operations should be run on a 'table' (really a list of tuples) ... and the structure of the 'table' will obviously not be known until run-time. I didn't find any examples of using idioms from functional programming beyond basic explanation of reduce and map (I have a couple of Haskell and ML books, but I know those languages even less than Python). I hope you understand the problem. Thanks in advance. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list