On Mar 17, 1:31 pm, Duncan Booth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > A common explanation for this is that lists are for homogenous > collections, tuples are for when you have heterogenous collections i.e. > related but different things.
I interpret this as meaning that in a data table, I should have a list of records but each record should be a tuple of fields, since the fields for a table usually have different forms whereas the records usually all have the same record layout. Makes sense, but not exactly *because* of the homogenous/heterogenous thing but rather because a record is smaller than a table, and a records component fields are more closely bound together than the records in a table. In short, adding, removing and overwriting records are essential operations (though Haskell programmers might disagree). Any modifications to records themselves can practically be handled as replacing one complete tuple with another. As a final note, I tend to implement tables as either lists of dictionaries, or lists of class instances. That way my fields are named. Its better in maintenance terms if I need to add new fields to the tables later on. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
