On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 10:19 PM, Aaron Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Nov 3, 3:45 pm, Ben Finney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: >> "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. > > Yea, verily. How many languages do you think that is? Feel free to > count C and C++ as different ones. > > "Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two...." > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Hand_Grenade_of_Antioch#Usage_instructions >
Well, I wouldn't dare to say I know a lot of languages but the ones I do provide mechanisms to define structures / records: C, C++, Scheme, Common Lisp, Haskell, SML, Ocaml. This is obviously a minority if you count all available programming languages in the world, but I would dare to say these cover a lot of ground. However, I wouldn't dare to say Python needs structures to be a good language, or anything similar. My question was more directed to : if there aren't structures in Python, what do Pythonists use instead? (I have seen dicts might be an alternative, but as I said in previous post, they seem to flexible [making them a canon to shoot a fly, and they probably lack constant-time access, right?] -- Paulo Jorge Matos - pocmatos at gmail.com Webpage: http://www.personal.soton.ac.uk/pocm -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list