Python Metalanguage confusticates and bebothers me...
Dan Schmidt
dfan at harmonixmusic.com
Wed Sep 6 09:22:40 EDT 2000
jonadab at bright.net (Jonadab the Unsightly One) writes:
| Python itself is okay (well, so far anyway). But the
| metalanguage -- the terminology used to discuss features
| of the language -- is weirding me out. "Dictionaries"
| aren't dictionaries at all, they're associative arrays.
'Dictionary' is a common synonym for 'associative array' in computer
science.
| "Tuples" don't necessarily have three elements.
What leads you to believe that they would? Are you confusing 'tuple'
with 'triple'? In mathematics, a 3-tuple is an ordered list of three
elements, a 5-tuple is an ordered list of five elements, etc. The
word 'tuple' by itself explicitly contains no information about the
number of elements.
--
Dan Schmidt | http://www.dfan.org
Honest Bob CD now available! | http://www.dfan.org/honestbob/cd.html
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