[Tutor] language aid

[Albert-Jan Roskam]

Hi,
 
A dictionary (associative array of keys and values) seems a good datatype to use.
vocab = {}
vocab[frenchword] = englishword
 
For instance:
>>> vocab = {"aimer": "love"}
>>> vocab
{'aimer': 'love'}
>>> vocab["parler"] = "speak"
>>> vocab
{'aimer': 'love', 'parler': 'speak'}
>>> for engword, frword in vocab.iteritems():
 print "%s - %s" % (engword, frword)
 aimer - love
parler - speak
 
But if one word has different meanings in the other language, you may need to use a list of words as the values.

Cheers!!
Albert-Jan

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
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--- On Thu, 2/4/10, Owain Clarke <simbobo at cooptel.net> wrote:


From: Owain Clarke <simbobo at cooptel.net>
Subject: [Tutor] language aid
To: tutor at python.org
Date: Thursday, February 4, 2010, 11:43 AM


Hello, all.

I am a newcomer to Python, and I know that I have much learning to do before I implement my idea, but I am working on the beginnings of a vocabulary building program. This is how I am catching new words at the moment.

def newVocab(x,y):
"""
Add new word pair, English word second.
Words to be separated by ':' """
x.append(y)

I can follow this with

french = []
newVocab(french,"souris:mouse")

The idea is that eventually the user would be prompted to enter a french (or whatever) word, and then to enter its English equivalent. The code would then be responsible for adding the ":" storing all the words in a list which would be written to a file, and recovering them as needed. Although i don't know how at this point, I assume I can search the part of the string before the colon or after, and thus set up vocabulary tests.

My question is, that if I proceed like this I will end up with a single list of potentially several hundred strings of the form "frword:engword". In terms of performance, is this a reasonable way to do it, or will the program increasingly slow down?

All suggestions appreciated


Owain Clarke

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