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Years ago I wrote a bunch of code in Pascal to analyze a large dataset on a population of African farmers. Now I need to resuscitate the data and do some further analysis. Pascal is obsolete and I am considering learning Python for this. But before I take the leap I hope someone can let me know what the old data structures would look like in Python. Most of the structures were what Pascal called arrays of records; they looked like this

PersonType = record name, mother, father, age, birthplace, religion, income end;

PersonArray [1..12] of PersonType;

What would that look like in Python? Thanks!

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    I don't know Pascal, but that looks like a NamedTuple or dataclass (depending on if you want the object to be immutable or mutable). Python doesn't have special constructs like record. Types originate as classes, similar to other languages with classes. Some types like NamedTuple and dataclass modify how the classes work to add some new things. Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 14:00
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    Translating code idioms from one language to another is generally off topic for Stack Overflow, due to subjectivity. Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 14:01
  • If you could be very specific about what behavior you're after though, we might be able to help. Not knowing Pascal, we can only go on what your code looks like, and ya, there may be multiple different interpretations. Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 14:17
  • Sorry, I thought the data structure I was asking about would be clear. It is a rectangular structure, i.e. columns and rows. For each household there are 12 groups of mixed string and integer variables, or put differently, 12 rows each containing 7 columns. The data files contain lots of these rectangles one after the other. To be specific, I want to read them and manipulate them once they are read, which leads me to ask what how that data structure would be defined in python. Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 20:22

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What you call a record, is generally (not just in Python) referred to as a structure, or shortly a struct.

Searching for arrays of structs gave me this URL (one of the many) on this subject.

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3 Comments

I wouldn't use this unless you know that you want a C struct. If you're doing normal Python programming, you normally don't dip into C Types.
@Carcigenicate: what's the Python equivalent of a C language struct? I thought Python also has its struct type?
For normal use, that's just class. ctypes is used to interface with C/the OS and do low-level memory manipulation. Specifically for them though, there's a few meta classes that might do what they're after.

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