Lie wrote: > On Feb 16, 12:29 pm, Jeff Schwab <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Paul Rubin wrote: >>> Jeff Schwab <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >>>> Why not? They seem intuitive to me. I would find it weird if you >>>> couldn't have 0-tuple, and even weirder if you couldn't have a >>>> 1-tuple. Maybe my brain has been warped by too much C++ code. >>> The idea is that a 2-tuple (of numbers, say) is a pair of numbers, a >>> 3-tuple is three numbers, and a 1-tuple is one number. That would >>> mean a number and a 1-tuple of numbers are the same thing, not >>> separate types. >> No, that doesn't follow. A set with one element is not the same thing >> as that element, a sequence of one element is not the same thing as that >> element, and a tuple with one element is not the same thing as that element. > > Probably the analogue of tuples in human language would be like this: > A: What ice-cream flavour do you have? > B: "Vanilla", "Chocolate", and "Strawberry" > > If, for example, he only have Vanilla: > A: What ice-cream flavour do you have? > B: "Vanilla" > > This way of thinking makes 1-tuple the same as the element itself.
Yes. I first heard the term "tuple" in a physics class, where it was used to mean that a mathematical function took an arbitrary number of objects. It was by analog with "triple, quadruple, quintuple... n-tuple." That's a different context than computer science, though, which is a specific branch of mathematics with its own terminology. In CS, a tuple is a kind of data structure that is specifically not identical with any of its elements. That's the sort of tuple used in Python. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
