Collecting Rich Data Structures for students

[Paddy]

On Jan 9, 2:19 am, "kirby.ur... at gmail.com" <kirby.ur... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Greetings Pythoneers --
>
> Some of us over on edu-sig, one of the community actives,
> have been brainstorming around this Rich Data Structures
> idea, by which we mean Python data structures already
> populated with non-trivial data about various topics such
> as:  periodic table (proton, neutron counts); Monty Python
> skit titles; some set of cities (lat, long coordinates); types
> of sushi.
>
> Obviously some of these require levels of nesting, say
> lists within dictionaries, more depth of required.
>
> Our motivation in collecting these repositories is to give
> students of Python more immediate access to meaningful
> data, not just meaningful programs.  Sometimes all it takes
> to win converts, to computers in general, is to demonstrate
> their capacity to handle gobs of data adroitly.  Too often,
> a textbook will only provide trivial examples, which in the
> print medium is all that makes sense.
>
> Some have offered XML repositories, which I can well
> understand, but in this case we're looking specifically for
> legal Python modules (py files), although they don't have
> to be Latin-1 (e.g. the sushi types file might not have a
> lot of romanji).
>
> If you have any examples you'd like to email me about,
> kirby.ur... at gmail.com is a good address.
>
> Here's my little contribution to the mix:http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/python/gis.py
>
> Kirby Urner
> 4D Solutions
> Silicon Forest
> Oregon

I would think there was more data out there formatted as Lisp S-
expressions than Python data-structures.
Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on 'wrapping' XML and CSV data-
sources?

- Paddy.