Clarification of notation

[Bruce W.]

So, this kind of notation would be different:
args[0][2]
verses args[[0][2]]
the latter is multidimensional.  Can you think of example of using this 
type of list?
I  don't know why this had me a bit confused.  I've got to get into 
programming more...  I had done more in the past.
Bruce

Chriebert wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Bruce Whealton
> <bruce at futurewavedesigns.com> wrote:
>   
>> Hello all,
>>         I recently started learning python.  I am a bit thrown by a certain
>> notation that I see.  I was watching a training course on lynda.com and this
>> notation was not presented.  For lists, when would you use what appears to
>> be nested lists, like:
>> [[], [], []]
>> a list of lists?
>>     
>
> Lists are for working with a group of data. Sometimes each datum
> happens to itself be a list; thus, one naturally ends up with a
> list-of-lists.
>
> Say I have, for each school in my school district, a list of its
> students' test scores. I want to compute each school's average score.
> So I put all the lists of scores into a nested list. I then iterate
> over the nested list, taking the average of each inner list of scores.
> (Do the analogous thing at higher and higher levels of aggregation
> (e.g. county, state, country) and you naturally get progressively more
> nested lists.)
>
>   
>> Would you, and could you combine a dictionary with a list in this fashion?
>>     
>
> Yes, of course:
> {'a' : [1,2,3]}
> [{'a' : 1}, {'b' : 2}]
>
> Just note that lists can't be dictionary keys due to their mutability.
> {[1,2,3] : "one two three"} # ERROR
>
>   
>> Next, from the documentation I see and this is just an example (this kind of
>> notation is seen elsewhere in the documentation:
>>
>> str.count(sub[, start[, end]])
>> This particular example is from the string methods.
>>     
> <snip>
>   
>> I know that it would
>> suggest that some of the arguments are optional, so perhaps if there are 2
>> items the first is the sub, and the second is start?  Or did I read that
>> backwards?
>>     
>
> No, you read it exactly correctly. The []s here indicate levels of
> optional-ness and have nothing to do with the list datatype.
>
> Basically, if you want to pass an optional argument, you have to have
> also specified any less-nested arguments (unless you use keyword
> rather than positional arguments).
> str.count(a) # sub = a
> str.count(a, b) # sub = a, start = b
> str.count(a, b, c) # sub = a, start = b, end = c
>
> Usually, it's straightforward left-to-right as you specify more
> arguments (doing otherwise requires kludges or black magic). However,
> there are rare exceptions, the most common one being range()/xrange():
>
> range(...)
>     range([start,] stop[, step]) -> list of integers
>
> Thus:
> range(a) # stop = a  (*not* start = a, as would be normal)
> range(a, b) # start = a, stop = b
> range(a, b, c) # start = a, stop = b, step = c
>
> Cheers,
> Chris
> --
> http://blog.rebertia.com
>
>