"literal" objects

[Moosebumps]

I've googled all over for this but can't find an answer...

I'm fairly new to Python, and wondering if you can just list a bunch of
objects as data.  For example, in C you would just do something like this:

struct
{
    int a;
    float b;
} mystruct;

mystruct x = { 3, 5.0f };
mystruct y = { 5, 15.0f };

These are just "data".  Obviously in python you could just write an init
function like this:

x.a = 3;
x.b = 5;

y.a = 5;
y.b = 15;

And that would work fine, but the programmer in me says that that's a pretty
inelegant way to do it.  Why execute code when all you need is to put data
in the program?

A thought that occured to me is that classes are implemented as dictionaries
(correct?).  So you could have a dictionary like this:

x = {'a': 3, 'b': 5}
y = {'a': 5, 'b': 15}

This would be the __dict__ attribute of an object I suppose.  But I don't
see anyway to assign it to a variable so you could access them like x.a and
y.a.  I don't know if this would be a "nice" way to do it or not.

Question 2:

If "subfolder" is a folder under "basefolder", and basefolder contains
"base.py", and subfolder contains "sub.py", how do I import sub.py into
base.py?  From what I can tell so far it only works if the files are in the
same directory.  I need to be able to do this without modifying any
environment variables or anything.  Because the scripts will be run on many
different machines and I have no way of automatically configuring them.

thanks,
MB