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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