On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 10:30 AM, Charles Hixson <charleshi...@earthlink.net> wrote: > That depends on what you're doing. For many, perhaps most, purposes I would > agree. Not for this one. And I couldn't use an internal dict, as the order > in which the items of the sub-lists occur is significant. The sub-lists > need to be lists, though they could be separated out as named variables > (which would be lists).
It sounds like a collections.OrderedDict should do what you need. In the cases where you really need to have a list of keys or values, you can just use the .keys() and .values() methods. > The ActiveState recipe *might* do what I want. I honestly can't tell after > a brief study. But it's much too complex to be a worthwhile choice. I was > hoping that I'd just overlooked one of the standard features of Python. What do you find complex about it? The two class definitions are something you would put in a library module to be imported. The rest is just example / test code. The actual usage is no more complex than a regular property: class Node(object): def __init__(self, nodeId, key, value, downRight, downLeft, parent): dirty = True dlu = utcnow() self.node = [nodeId, downLeft, [key], [value], [downRight], parent, dirty, dlu] @itemproperty def key(self, index): return self.node[2][index] @itemproperty def value(self, index): return self.node[3][index] And of course you could also add setters and/or deleters if desired. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list