On Jul 20, 12:27 pm, Phillip B Oldham <phillip.old...@gmail.com> wrote: > My colleagues and I have been working with python for around 6 months > now, and while we love a lot of what python has done for us and what > it enables us to do some of the decisions behind such certain > data-types and their related methods baffle us slightly (when compared > to the decisions made in other, similarly powerful languages). > > Specifically the "differences" between lists and tuples have us > confused and have caused many "discussions" in the office. We > understand that lists are mutable and tuples are not, but we're a > little lost as to why the two were kept separate from the start. They > both perform a very similar job as far as we can tell. > > Consider the following: > > >>> x = [2,1,3] > >>> x.sort() > >>> print x > > [1, 2, 3] > > Now, if the sort operations were unable to affect the original > structure of the list (as in JavaScript) you'd effectively have a > tuple which you could add/remove from, and the example above would > look more like: > > >>> x = [2,1,3] > >>> print x.sort() > [1, 2, 3] > >>> print x > > [2,1,3] > > This make a lot more sense to us, and follows the convention from > other languages. It would also mean chaining methods to manipulate > lists would be easier: > > >>> x = [2,1,3] > >>> print x.sort()[0] > 3 > >>> print x > > [2,1,3] > > We often find we need to do manipulations like the above without > changing the order of the original list, and languages like JS allow > this. We can't work out how to do this in python though, other than > duplicating the list, sorting, reversing, then discarding. > > We're not looking to start any arguments or religious wars and we're > not asking that python be changed into something its not. We'd simply > like to understand the decision behind the lists and tuple structures. > We feel that in not "getting" the difference between the two types we > may be missing out on using these data structures to their full > potential.
A tuple can be used like a struct in C - the number of fields is meant to be fixed and should not be dynamically changed. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
