Alex Martelli wrote: > However, since Christoph himself just misclassified C++'s std::map as > "ordered" (it would be "sorted" in this new terminology he's now > introducing), it seems obvious that the terminological confusion is > rife. Many requests and offers in the past for "ordered dictionaries" > (e.g. on this group) were also "sorted", NOT "ordered", in this new > terminology.
I'm sorry again. Please don't conclude that others are as uneducated as I am (I haven't studied computer science but mathematics). Speaking about "ordered" and "sorted" in the context of collections is not a new terminology I am introducing, but seems to be pretty common in computer science (see, e.g. http://www.gamespp.com/java/dataStructuresInJavaPart6.html). Perhaps Pythonists are not used to that terminology, since they use the term "list" for an "ordered collection". An ordered dictionary is a dictionary whose keys are a (unique) list. Sometimes it is also called a "sequence" (therefore in the odict implementation, the keys attribute has this name). A unique list, in turn, can also be called an "ordered set", so you can also understand an ordered dictionary as a dictionary whose keys are an ordered set. I think all of this is pretty logical ;-) -- Christoph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list