> is there any typical usage that shows their difference? I think the general idea is to use lists for homogenous collections and tuples for heterogenous structures.
I think the database API provides a good usage that shows their differences. When you do cursor.fetchall() after executing a query, you get back a list of tuples. Each tuple is one "record" from the cursor. "tuple" is even the term used in relational database theory when talking about a table row. You shouldn't be able to add or remove fields from a query result, so using a tuple is a perfect match for this. On the other hand, you can certainly add, delete, or replace entire tuples in the result set, so it makes sense to use a list to hold the set of tuples. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
