IFB104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Database, Newline, Management System
Document Summary
Lists as ephemeral storage: we have seen that sequence structures such as lists provide a convenient way to store and retrieve values. Lists (and similar data structures such as arrays) mimic the way data is stored in computer memory, as an addressable or indexable sequence of values: but lists only exist as long as the program is running. If we stop the program and restart it the values stored in the lists are lost: also, the way in which the data is structured is peculiar to the particular program. There may be many different ways to store the same information in lists. The simplest way to automate permanent data storage is to store data in text files and write programs to access data in the files. In python we can use for-each loops to iterate easily through the lines in a text file - always remember that the string representing each line has a newline character at the end.
