Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 04/29/07 12:54

Scripsit dorayme:

> In article <TmkYh.44722$YY7.25263@reader1.news.saunalahti.fi>,
> "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
>
>> A table is logically a list of lists
>
> A table certainly contains lists. It may even contain a list of
> lists. But, I am having trouble believing it is (logically) a
> list of lists.

Note that my text continues, after the piece quoted above: "with the
same number of items and with some meaningful relationship across the inner
lists so that the n'th items in inner lists have some connection with each
other".

Thus, a table is _more_ than a list of lists, as explained above. We could
also describe this by saying that a table is a list of lists _in two ways_:
a list of rows, which are lists, and a list of columns, which are lists. But
there's still more: the relationship I mentioned above.

> A list of lists in the sense in which we have become familiar on
> this newsgroup would perhaps be a nested list.

If "nested list" means more than a list of lists, then it means a particular
_rendering_ of such a construct. Apparently, for a table, which is _more_
than a list of lists, namely with relationships across the lists, such
rendering is usually not optimal.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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