Class or Dictionary?

[Martin De Kauwe]

On Feb 12, 11:13 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Feb 2011 10:15:27 -0800, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> > I'd use a class rather than a dictionary - because with a class, pylint
> > (and perhaps PyChecker and pyflakes?) should be able to detect typos
> > upfront.  
>
> *Some* typos. Certainly not all.
>
> The more complex the code -- and with 100 or so parameters, this sounds
> pretty damn complex -- there is a non-negligible risk of mistakenly using
> the wrong name. Unless pylint now has a "do what I mean, not what I say"
> mode, it can't save you from typos like this:
>
> params.employerID = 23
> params.employeeID = 42
> # much later
> if params.employeeID == 23:
>     # Oops, I meant employ*er*ID
>     ...
>
> > With a dictionary, typos remain runtime timebombs.
>
> Are your unit tests broken? You should fix that and not rely on just
> pylint to detect bugs. Unit tests will help protect you against many more
> bugs than just typos.
>
> Besides, and I quote...
>
> "I find it amusing when novice programmers believe their main job is
> preventing programs from crashing. ... More experienced programmers
> realize that correct code is great, code that crashes could use
> improvement, but incorrect code that doesn't crash is a horrible
> nightmare." -- Chris Smith
>
> --
> Steven

The 100+ parameters just means "everything" can be adjusted outside of
the code, invariable most of it isn't. I am setting this up with some
bayesian calibration in mind. A lot of those parameters will be
switches as well. I think perhaps I will write a defaults module and
just read a .INI file with the values the user wants changing.
Originally I was just going to read everything in, but maybe this is
better from a usage point of view.

As I said I am happy to consider a dictionary, although some of the
calculations are quite complex and I *think* it is easier to read this
way, rather than with a dictionary. That is purely an opinion, I don't
have a computer science background and so I am asking really, is what
I am doing very bad, and if so why? What do other people do? I have
tried to search a lot on this subject but I find the example not very
specific, (or I am reading the wrong places).

thanks.