[Python-ideas] namedlist() or Record type

[anatoly techtonik]

Rationale: There are many 2D data with table layout where order is
important and it is hard to work with them in Python.

The use case:
1. Get data row from a table
2. Change row column by name
3. Save data back

For example, termios.tcgetattr() returns list [iflag, oflag, cflag,
lflag, ispeed, ospeed, cc]. I need to modify some bits in lflag value
and save this list back. In my code it looks like:

            newattr[3] &= ~termios.ICANON

I want to get rid of magic number 3 without defining additional
variables just for names. I thought that namedtuple can help here, but
it is read-only and seems not serializeable.

What I want is:

    >>> data = [1, 'john', 23434]
    >>> named = Record(data, ['id', 'name', 'number'])
    >>> named.id = 3
    >>> named.name
    'john'
    >>> named
    [3, 'john', 23434]
    >>> named.naem
    AttributeError(...)
    >>> named.dict()
    {'id': 3, 'name': john, 'number': 23434}
    >>> named.json()
    ...

I hacked OrderedDict to accept list as param and allow attribute
access. It doesn't behave as named list - you still need to call
.values() to get list back, and indexed access doesn't work as well.

http://bugs.python.org/file31026/DictRecord.py

--
anatoly t.