Collecting Rich Data Structures for students

[Paddy]

On Jan 9, 11:05 pm, "kirby.ur... at gmail.com" <kirby.ur... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 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

Then I'd favour the simple wrappings of bearophile and Frederik Lundhs
replies where it is easy to extract the original datamaybe for
updating , or for use in another language.

- Paddy.