Collecting Rich Data Structures for students

[kirby.urner at gmail.com]

On Jan 10, 1:01 am, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr... at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 15:05:25 -0800 (PST), "kirby.ur... at gmail.com"
> <kirby.ur... at gmail.com> declaimed the following in comp.lang.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 Pythondatastructure
> > maybe simply be the most relevant place to start.
>
>         In this particular example, I'd probably suggest stuffing thedata
> into an SQLite3 database file... Searching on name, symbol, weight, etc.
> would be much easier then trying to dig through a nested dictionary.
>
> --
>         Wulfraed        Dennis Lee Bieber               KD6MOG
>         wlfr... at ix.netcom.com          wulfr... at bestiaria.com
>                 HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
>         (Bestiaria Support Staff:               web-a... at bestiaria.com)
>                 HTTP://www.bestiaria.com/

That's not a bad idea.  We might see people passing ZODBs around
more too, as 'import zodb' in IDLE or whatever is increasingly
the style, vs. some megabundle you have to install.  Think of
Zope as another site-package.

The advantage of just passing .py files around, among XO users
for example, is the periodicTable.py's contents are directly
eyeballable as ascii/unicode text, vs. stuffed into a wrapper.

I think what I'm getting from this fruitful discussion is the
different role of amalgamator-distributors, and Sayid or Kate
as classroom teachers, just trying to get on with the lesson
and having no time for computer science topics.

XML or YAML also make plenty of sense, for the more generic
distributor type operations.

Speaking only for myself, I appreciated some of the pointers
to APIs.  Over on edu-sig, we've been talking a lot about
the 3rd party module for accessing imdb information -- not
a screen scraper.

Given xml-rpc, there's really no limit on the number of
lightweight APIs we might see.  How about CIA World Factbook?
Too boring maybe, but it's already going out on the XOs, or
some of them, just because it's relatively up to date.
Could be imported as Python module too -- maybe that work
has already been done?

Kirby