Collecting Rich Data Structures for students

[Paddy]

On Jan 9, 6:52 am, Paddy <paddy3... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.

The more I think on it the more I am against this- data should be
stored in programming language agnostic forms but which are easily
made available to a large range of programming languages.
If the format is easily parsed by AWK then it is usually easy to parse
in a range of programming languages.

- Paddy.