terminological obscurity

[David Eppstein]

In article <40aec6ff$0$17254$a1866201 at newsreader.visi.com>,
 Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:

> > Can't it be said, in helping to distinguish a Python list from the
> > standard collections in, say, Java and C++ - that among its most
> > important attributes is the ease with which one can work with a list
> > as a collection of objects of *heterogenous* type. "Type" here being
> > used in the sense that programmers generally use the word.
> 
> I think the fact that Python lists can be heterogogenous is one
> of the most brilliantly useful things in the language, but
> apparently we're not supposed to use lists like that.

It's not heterogeneity of type you're supposed to avoid, it's 
heterogeneity of purpose.  That is, you should be intending to treat 
each cell of the list similarly.

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science