Michele Alzetta wrote: > In the end my program will have to create a printed representation of a > certain number of "things" which are characterized by each having a time > attribute (moment when they start, moment when they end); each "thing" > will have to be filled in by a certain content, chosen from a user > defined list of possibilities; however each thing will also have to have > a series of other attributes ... which will change during the process of > assigning content (for instance: once content 'A' is assigned to > foo, bar immediately following may well change some attribute ... BUT > the effect of content A on foo and bar may well be different from the > effect of content B. Naturally if content A is present in a certain > thing it can't be present in a contemporaneaous one... sounds a mess ? > It is ... also, the rules by which A and B influence the content will > have to be modifiable by the user.) > > At the moment I am collecting user input into a dictionary of lists. The > question is: do you believe it would be better to code a series of > functions to interact with my dictionary and keep data, attributes etc. > in lists therein, or would it be more efficient to create an appointment > class, create a new instance of each class for each appointment, and > eventually store each instance in a dictionary ?
I don't understand your requirements, but I would think the choice would be between a list of dicts and a list of custom classes. I don't see how the dict of lists would work. Do you have parallel lists, one for each attribute? IMO that is generally a bad design, the attributes should be grouped somehow. It sounds like an appointment class might help, it would give you a place to put the code that operates on appointments and give you more convenient access to attributes. Probably a Rule class would help too. You could try using a dict to represent an appointment - the simplest thing that could possibly work. If you have to create a bunch of functions that operate on a single appointment at a time, then switch to a class-based implementation. Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
