How does "for" work?
Alex Martelli
aleaxit at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 11 18:45:25 EDT 2000
"Steve Juranich" <sjuranic at condor.ee.washington.edu> wrote in message
news:Pine.SOL.3.96.1001011131237.10163C-100000 at condor.ee.washington.edu...
[snip]
> > rather than a list? Using it correctly with a for-loop requires
> > that the keys be a compact set of integers from 0 upwards -- and
> > in this case, what do you gain by making it a dictionary rather
[snip]
> self.data is a time-indexed bunch of data structures. I would have used a
> list, but I wanted to allow for start times != 0. I know that in the
other
> "P" language, it allows re-defining the start index of a list. Has Python
> implemented a similar bad idea?
No, list-index always starts from 0 in Python. But then, you DO need
the first index to be 0 if the object is to be iterated on with a for
statement -- that one calls the __getelement__ method starting from
0, too. So, a list, plus a separate 'actual start index', seems a
better solution than an array.
Alex
More information about the Python-list
mailing list