trictionary?

[Steven Bethard]

Adam Tomjack wrote:
> Steven Bethard wrote:
> ...
>> Using a two element list to store a pair of counts has a bad code 
>> smell to me.
> ...
> 
> Why is that?

Note that "code smell"[1] doesn't mean that something is actually wrong, 
just that it might be.  In Python, pairs are usually handled with 
tuples[2], but tuples would be inconvenient in this case, since the 
first value must be modified.  Declaring a class with two attributes as 
you suggested is often a good substitute, but if the OP's code is really 
what it looks like, I get another code smell because declaring a class 
to be used by only 10 lines of code seems like overkill.

I also get a code smell from a dict holding two-element lists because 
I've been writing in Python and answering questions on the Python-list 
for a couple of years now, and I've never needed one yet. ;-)

STeVe

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell
[2]http://www.python.org/doc/faq/general.html#why-are-there-separate-tuple-and-list-data-types