On Jan 10, 1:01 am, Dennis Lee Bieber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 15:05:25 -0800 (PST), "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> declaimed the following in comp.lang.python: > > > Sometimes we spare the students (whomever they may be) this added > > step and just hand them a dictionary of lists or whatever. We > > may not be teaching parsing in this class, but chemistry, and > > having the info in the Periodic Table in a Pythondatastructure > > maybe simply be the most relevant place to start. > > In this particular example, I'd probably suggest stuffing thedata > into an SQLite3 database file... Searching on name, symbol, weight, etc. > would be much easier then trying to dig through a nested dictionary. > > -- > Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG > [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] > HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/ > (Bestiaria Support Staff: [EMAIL PROTECTED]) > HTTP://www.bestiaria.com/
That's not a bad idea. We might see people passing ZODBs around more too, as 'import zodb' in IDLE or whatever is increasingly the style, vs. some megabundle you have to install. Think of Zope as another site-package. The advantage of just passing .py files around, among XO users for example, is the periodicTable.py's contents are directly eyeballable as ascii/unicode text, vs. stuffed into a wrapper. I think what I'm getting from this fruitful discussion is the different role of amalgamator-distributors, and Sayid or Kate as classroom teachers, just trying to get on with the lesson and having no time for computer science topics. XML or YAML also make plenty of sense, for the more generic distributor type operations. Speaking only for myself, I appreciated some of the pointers to APIs. Over on edu-sig, we've been talking a lot about the 3rd party module for accessing imdb information -- not a screen scraper. Given xml-rpc, there's really no limit on the number of lightweight APIs we might see. How about CIA World Factbook? Too boring maybe, but it's already going out on the XOs, or some of them, just because it's relatively up to date. Could be imported as Python module too -- maybe that work has already been done? Kirby -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
