Nick Maclaren wrote: > My understanding of the difference between a tuple and a list is > PRECISELY that the former is immutable and the latter mutable.
while tuples can be used as "frozen lists", that's definitely not what they are, from a design perspective. just like in math [1], a Python tuple is a heterogeneous sequence where the position implies type and usage. in contrast, a list is a homo- geneous collection where all the items are "the same" in some sense, no matter where they are. if you sort or otherwise reorder a list of things, it's still a list of the same things. if you sort a tuple, you'll break it. in other words, you're supposed to know what the individual items are in a tuple; if you feel the need to search for things by value in a tuple, you're using the wrong container type. </F> 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
