Collecting Rich Data Structures for students

[kirby.urner at gmail.com]

On Jan 9, 8:15 am, Paddy <paddy3... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.

It's OK to be against it, but as many have pointed out, it's often
just one value adding step to go from plaintext or XML to something
specifically Python.

Sometimes we spare the students (whomever they may be) this added
step and just hand them a dictionary of lists or whatever.  We
may not be teaching parsing in this class, but chemistry, and
having the info in the Periodic Table in a Python data structure
maybe simply be the most relevant place to start.

Many lesson plans I've seen or am working on will use these .py
data modules.

Kirby