python list/array question...

Bruno Desthuilliers onurb at xiludom.gro
Wed Jul 5 12:09:56 EDT 2006


Sybren Stuvel wrote:
> Bruno Desthuilliers enlightened us with:
> 
>>Python has lists (which AFAIK really are arrays not linked lists,
>>but they are called 'lists').
> 
> 
> An array is generally understood as a list of items of the same type,
> hence Python lists aren't arrays.

A list is generally understood as a linked list, hence Python lists are
not lists !-)

Also, in statically typed languages, lists are supposed to be homogenous
 ordered collections of variable length (cf ML/Haskell...). And FWIW,
this is also the intended semantic for Python lists (cf GvR's comments
on list vs tuple respective semantics)

But, to be honnest:
in a lot of languages, an array is supposed to be of fixed size, hence
Python lists aren't arrays !-)

Now the question is: since Python lists are neither arrays nor lists,
how should we name them ?-)

-- 
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for
p in 'onurb at xiludom.gro'.split('@')])"



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