structs/records in mathematica
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg41767] structs/records in mathematica
- From: sidney at jigsaw.nl (Sidney Cadot)
- Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 08:34:50 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Hi All, Currently I am involved in a project to read satellite data files into languages such as IDL and others. We're also considering implementing a Mathematica interface. For this application, we need the ability to represent classical records/structs (as found in imperative languages such as C/Pascal), having named fields with an associated value. Since such a type is not directly supported in Mathematica, we'd like to know if there is a 'standard' way of handling this type of situation. We're currently thinking of using a list of rules, e.g. data = { id->"this_or_that", value->17.3, compound->{id->"compound_id", value->18.4} } but this makes selecting a value a bit awkward: value/.(compound/.data) since this is syntactically the reverse of what one would expect in a language like C/Pascal (data.compound.value), and the /. operator is left-associative (therefore requiring parentheses in case of nested structs). Is there perhaps a better way/standard idiom for handling situations like this? Best regards, Sidney Cadot Science and Technology Corp., The Netherlands
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