Python Lists vs. Tuples
nedbatchelder.com
nedbatchelder.com
Python is not a language that "gets it", despite the article's examples. Python chooses the much-less-useful distinction between "immutable sequence" and "mutable sequence"; the lack of any other distinction is borne out by the standard library (as dozzie points out here [1]). Furthermore, the issue of immutable vs. mutable is totally orthogonal to that of dynamic/static and homogeneous/heterogeneous. There's no reason that "cultural" lists need be mutable, or "cultural" tuples need be immutable. So Python's choice doesn't make sense from this angle either.
For example, OCaml has both immutable lists and immutable tuples; its type system enforces exactly the "cultural difference". Similarly with C, which has both mutable lists (arrays) and mutable tuples (structs), both of which can be rendered immutable (const). Why Python chose lists (and only lists!) to have both immutable and mutable flavors, with otherwise identical semantics, is beyond me.
Erlang used to "get it", but they lost the thread when they came out with heterogeneous syntax support for a homogeneous structure (map). TLA+ totally conflates tuples with lists, but its type system is rich enough to enforce the difference (and as a bonus, allows for the elusive static homogeneous structure).
Static heterogeneous structures (tuples) have a non-uniform structure, but need not resize. The former harms performance (run-time type info must be kept for each element, though usually few); the latter helps it (most accesses can be compiled to simple pointer arithmetic).
On the other hand, dynamic heterogeneous structures (Python's lists) do not have uniform structure, and must be able to resize. So run-time type info must be preserved (adding memory/access overhead), and accesses can't be optimized at compile time (more runtime machinery). It is to avoid these issues that things like numpy and JavaScript's typed arrays exist.
There is almost never a reason to use a dynamic heterogeneous structure, so they are best avoided. A dynamic heterogeneous collection can neither support indexing a priori known components (since it is dynamic), nor support iteration (since it is heterogeneous). (Note that a collection of objects of different types but with a shared interface is in fact a homogeneous collection of objects with that interface.)
(The final combination is static homogeneous, but these are a subset of both the first two cases, and do not occur often. The only example I can think of are sets of statistics: all statistics have the same type, but there are a fixed number of them which are known at compile time. They can be optimized very well.)
Some of your comments make no sense even given the above, however. For example, Python lists and tuples certainly support iteration.
I apologize that I have hopped between use and implementation a bit in my above post. Yes, the implementation of Python lists and tuples support iteration, but it would be nonsensical to write code which iterated over a list or tuple containing heterogeneous data. (What could you possibly do identically to each element, if they had nothing in common?) Hence my assertion that implementing a dynamic heterogeneous structure is inefficient, if it nonsensical to truly use it as such.
There are Python functions that take any type like repr() or id()
Of course in languages which don't support a universal "object" type (say OCaml or C) you cannot do this -- numbers and strings have no interface in common. Those languages take advantage of this by not storing type information in collections (e.g. OCaml's float arrays, or any array in C), thus resulting in more compact memory footprints. If they instead allowed heterogeneous collections, the memory footprint of such collections would double.
Umm.. I haven't had to use any of them on a list(or for that matter on an object) for code.. (except when I'm curious and poking at python internals) May be I'm stuck in a web application role? Is it actually useful to say call repr() on a list of objects? May be call id to see if there's references to same object twice? I'm finding it hard to imagine cases where it would be needed to implement a feature, that wouldn't be better served by alternate methods.
I agree such a use case would be rare, but that doesn't mean such a use case cannot exist.
In languages with explicit static types and explicit Tagged Unions, it's not unreasonable to iterate across a homogeneous sequence of tagged unions, all of the same type. For example, Option<Int>. This is just a particular instance of the general pattern of iterating across a heterogeneous sequence, introspecting on whether a given value is of type Int or of type NoneType. Unless you want to allege that Null is a member of Integer (in a sane and healthy type system).
The point of this is that I'm skeptical that these are "invariably code smells". For example, our Option<Int> values might come from a SQL field that is a nullable integer. It seems entirely fair to iterate across them.
To me, code which acted on such elements without first consulting the common interface would be "smelly". e.g. code which assumes every other item is a string, or code which uses a list as an ad-hoc structure. There's almost always a better way to write such code.
(As an aside, I find the explicit use of RTTI a smell in and of itself, but one unrelated to containers. Code which today does two different things to some input, based on whether it's an integer or string, likely tomorrow will need to do three different things, two of which involve an integer. Tagged unions are almost always preferable.)
The nuance where I disagree with you was the point of my comment. I claim that there's no principled distinction between tagged unions and RTTI. (Except that of course usually implementations that refer to themselves with the phrase "tagged union" are a little more, uh, sophisticated, in exactly the kind of way that your comment about "likely tomorrow will need to do three different things.." alludes to eventually having a need for.)
Unless you can draw a principled distinction, then you can't on the one hand say "sequences of tagged unions are homogeneous" and on the other say "python sequences are potentially heterogeneous, and if you have a tuple of heterogeneous data and you iterate on it, that's invariably a code smell". Can you?
I mean, unless by "code smell" you mean "thing that's worth a double-look, because although it might be good code, it's easy for it to be evil code". In which case, we're in total agreement.
Python is "a dynamic language" mostly in the sense that it is "dynamically typed". (I'm sure you're aware, I'm not trying to patronize, just setting the stage.) That's one sense.
Tuples in Python are still dynamic in this sense, of course, because every damn value in Python is, for good or for ill. But there are at least two other senses in play here.
Compare C structs with, say, JS Objects. Both let you mutate the values they point to, but JS Objects let you add new property-names at will (or remove them). So one sense of "dynamic" is "resizeable".
We could also have a data type, e.g. linked lists in various "purely functional" languages, that can be resized (pushed and popped), but existing cells cannot be mutated. AIUI Clojure is full of this sort of thing.
Point #1 is that nothing in colanderman's comments argues against Python's dynamic typing.
My second and broader thought is that I agree with colanderman that it's weird that Python conflates these latter two senses of dynamism (resizeability and cell-mutability), and even more weird that it does so for one data type (the sequence) and more or less ignores it elsewhere (though e.g. frozendict does exist).
That would be a bad idea for at least two reasons: sometimes you want containers to be immutable, and mutable containers can't be used as dictionary keys.
Because I'm pretty sure that it's possible to use mutable objects as keys in general. The users just have to observe restrictions: like don't insert the keys into the dictionary and then mutate them while they are in the dictionary and expect the dictionary to still work fine.
(Objects can also be used as keys even if they are mutated while in the dictionary, if identity-based equality is used for the dictionary; i.e. two keys are equal if they are acually one and the same object, and not just two similar objects.)
(0) Object identities are used as keys? (e.g., two different list objects that contain the elements 1,2,3 are treated as different keys)
(1) Catastr... I mean, hilarious things happen if you mutate an object that's being used as a key?
Anyway, both languages use value-based hashing for dictionaries. I am not a Rubyist, but I guess you are just expected to not mutate the keys? Ruby's dictionary implementation also has a rehash method to deal with this case [1], if for some reason you are purposely mutating the keys I suppose...
[1] http://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/2.0.0/Hash.html#method-i-rehash
Ruby, since you said it allows mutable keys in dictionaries.
> Anyway, both languages use value-based hashing for dictionaries.
Neither Python nor Ruby has compound values. Object identities are primitive values.
> but I guess you are just expected to not mutate the keys?
I guess C programmers are expected not to use memory after they free it.
In other words, mutable objects don't work as keys, and pretending they do requires unenforced conventions to preserve the integrity of the dictionary abstraction.
> Objects can also be used as keys even if they are mutated while in the dictionary, if identity-based equality is used for the dictionary; i.e. two keys are equal if they are actually one and the same object, and not just two similar objects.
The fundamental problem is very simple: dictionary keys have to be values, not objects, and Python simply doesn't have compound values. There is no such thing as “the list [1,2,3]” in Python: you just have one or more objects whose current state happens to be the sequence 1,2,3. The very next moment, their states might be different sequences. Object identities are first-class values in Python, but identities are primitive and indecomposable - not compound!
>>> (1,2,3)[2]=5
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
Can (1, 2, [3]) be used in a hash table, and what if the [3] is mutated to [3, 4]?
>>> x = (1, 2, [3])
>>> x
(1, 2, [3])
>>> x[2].append(4)
>>> x
(1, 2, [3, 4])What you did was modify the underlying list, the tuple itself is immutable.
import ctypes
def tuple_setitem(t, index, item):
obj = ctypes.py_object(t)
item = ctypes.py_object(item)
ref_count = ctypes.c_long.from_address(id(t))
original_count = ref_count.value
if original_count != 1:
ref_count.value = 1
ctypes.pythonapi.Py_IncRef(item)
ctypes.pythonapi.PyTuple_SetItem(obj, ctypes.c_ssize_t(index), item)
ref_count.value = original_count
>>> x = (1, 2, 3,)
>>> tuple_setitem(x, 1, "foo")
>>> x
(1, "foo", 3)
If it has mutable items in it, yes. But in that case, the tuple can't be used as a dictionary key; Python checks, not just that the tuple itself is immutable, but that every object in it is immutable.
What does this gain you over just doing tuple(obj) (or the equivalent--tuple(d.items()) for a dictionary, for example) when you want to make it immutable for use as a dict key?
Which only makes sense if the underlying mutable object is mutated. But if the underlying mutable object is mutated, the adaptor instance, if it is immutable, can no longer have the same value as the underlying mutable object. So the "adaptor" is no longer an adaptor; it's just a separate immutable object with the value that the mutable object had originally. I.e., it's just the same as tuple(d.items()) or whatever.
If by "copy-on-write" you just mean that two different containers that both store the same immutable value, say a string, can both point to the same memory storing that value, and the mutable container's pointer only changes if a new value is stored at that key/index, Python already does that; for example, tuple(d.items()) does not create new storage for the items themselves, it points the tuple to the same objects that are contained in the dict at the time of the call to d.items().
> It can have more compact storage if the runtime is smart.
A tuple in Python does have more compact storage than a list, dict, or set.
> It can continue to efficiently support lookup
Same issue as above; this only matters if the underlying object is mutated, in which case an immutable "adaptor" can no longer have the same value, so lookup on the adaptor isn't the same as lookup on the underlying mutable object. Lookup on the adaptor is just lookup on the immutable value, which is easily made efficient.
Then again, I also use single and double quotes as a semantic guide to mean different things. I feel like that would probably make most programmers want to throw the computer at the wall, but so it goes
If you want the behaviour of Ruby strings, you might use a `bytes` or `bytearray` type, or you might use a list of chars.
But at any rate I wasn't thinking of performance characteristics but rather the stereotypical uses of symbols vs strings in languages that have both, so you are right that one can use Python strings in place of symbols, as SpaceManiac already pointed out above.
In Python, string literals are reused, if that is what you meant.
>>> a = 'abc'
>>> b = 'abc'
>>> a is b
Truesome_dict = {'key': "value"}
return '<a href="{}">{}</a>'.format(url, text)
return "<a href=\"{}\">{}</a>".format(url, text)
er, yes there is. if a list is not mutable, doing list.append(something) in a loop would re-initialize the list every loop iteration. the same reason you shouldn't add to a string in a loop, as strings are imitable.
to me, an immutable list is not a list.
So in practice you can often get away with pretending the lists you create are immutable, if that's what you want to do.
I was just trying to describe the state of practice in the Lisp world. I do agree that Lisp benefits from more functional data structures -- that's why I wrote FSet [0]! I would point out, though, that since Lisp lacks any kind of access control, there's nothing besides common sense and convention that prevents FSet client code from mucking about inside the guts of the FSet data structures. It would be a stupid thing to do, and everybody knows that, but the language doesn't prevent it. So the situation is not that different with FSet collections than it is with lists of unknown provenance.
Even in languages that nominally support access control, like C++ and Java, you can usually still get around it with casting or reflection. Most people know that they should play games like that only in very specific circumstances.
Just as in mathematics, once you've proven something, you can reuse the result as often as you want. But “the community always does this” isn't a proof.
> I do agree that Lisp benefits from more functional data structures (...) there's nothing besides common sense and convention that prevents FSet client code from mucking about inside the guts of the FSet data structures.
Then Lisp doesn't have functional data structures. That's no surprise, Lisp has no more compound values than Python or Ruby do - that is, none.
> Even in languages that nominally support access control, like C++ and Java, you can usually still get around it with casting or reflection.
Standard ML actually has type abstraction, and, once you've made something abstract, there's no way clients can inspect it. No downcasts, no reflection, no anything - abstract means abstract.
Ah, the arrogance of youth.
Anyway. A value is something you can bind to a variable. Unfortunately, you can't bind the list [1,2,3] (or whatever syntax you might prefer) to a variable in either Python or Lisp, because those languages simply don't have lists (or any other kind of compound value).
Actual useful implementations of Lisp, of course, may vary.
edit: s/list/Lisp/ in a particular place
Yet somehow it lets you distinguish between “this (list 1 2 3)” and “that (list 1 2 3)”. Distinguishing between copies of the same value isn't “useful”, it's a pain, because you need to jump to a metalanguage (say, Hoare logic) to get the values you actually want.
It's possible that you were misled by a silly typo in my comment, which I have just fixed.
With that in mind, could you clarify?
Lists aren't mutable in any language. A list is a sequence of elements. A different sequence is a different list. Some languages simply don't have lists.
It does, actually, if the integer is large enough:
> (ash 1 100)
1267650600228229401496703205376 ; 2 ^ 100
> (eq (ash 1 100) (ash 1 100))
NIL
So much the worse for Lisp, I suppose you would say, and perhaps you have a point. Lisp is not Haskell.
I don't entirely disagree with you; it would be nice if Lisp had an immutable list type. (Like FSet seqs [0].) But again, in practice, it's not as much of a deficiency as you seem to think.
Wow, this is even more broken than I previously thought.
> Lisp is not Haskell.
Haskell is broken too, only in a different way: Since when does it make sense to have a value that's simultaneously a number, a string, a function and pretty much anything else imaginable? (`undefined`)
> But again, in practice, it's not as much of a deficiency as you seem to think.
It causes difficulties when you want to reason rigorously about your code.
That's what he said. In practice it doesn't matter.
I reason rigorously about my code in practice.
I'm pretty sure you don't mean space leaks, and I'm pretty sure you don't mean global coherence of type classes, which are the two most popular complaints about reasoning about Haskell.
Other than that, can't you just say "this piece of code is at least as defined as the equivalent in a strict language" and leave it at that? What can go wrong?
Oh, that particular criticism wasn't aimed at Haskell, but rather at languages without compound values. And I never said you can't reason rigorously about code written in such languages. You can, but it isn't very pleasant.
> I'm pretty sure you don't mean global coherence of type classes, which are the two most popular complaints about reasoning about Haskell.
Far more serious one: Haskell doesn't have a type whose value inhabitants are the integers and nothing else. I would like to say “even Lisp has that”, but nope, it doesn't either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328095
Sure, I get that, but I don't get the practical consequences for reasoning. In Haskell, if you write
myIntFunction !x = expression
let myIntFunction x = expression
What's an example of something you wanted to prove in Haskell but couldn't, because it wasn't strict?
(0) In a language without compound values, you need to manually prove that object states faithfully represent the compound values you care about.
(1) In a dynamically typed language, you need to manually prove that computations produce the classes of values that their continuations expect.
(2) In a lazy language, you need to manually prove that variables will never be substituted with nonterminating computations.
> What's an example of something you wanted to prove in Haskell but couldn't, because it wasn't strict?
All the usual type class laws, without the pesky addendum “assuming no free variables are ever substituted with bottom, globally”. (In all fairness, strictness alone doesn't fix the problem either. At least not when laws have free variables of function type.) Redefining what variables can be substituted with is redefining the language's operational semantics, which in turn is effectively creating a new programming language. You would have to prove all the usual things from scratch: that type checking is decidable, that the type system is sound, etc.
In practice, I can still prove the things I want, but the proofs themselves are less modular in a lazy language. The problem manifests itself when you build large computations from smaller ones:
(0) In a strict language, whether any of the subcomputations terminates is a local issue, and doesn't affect the other subcomputations.
(1) In a lazy language, failure of one computation to be productive may be observed as a termination problem in a different computation.
I don't agree [#]. Providing a predicate that tests for identity of implementation enables a useful class of optimizations. For example, if you know two sets are implemented by the same object, you don't need to compare their contents to know they're equal. The fact that the information can be misused doesn't make it useless. Non-leakiness of abstractions isn't an unalloyed good.
In fact, because all computations take time and space, no abstraction can be perfectly leak-free.
[#] Except if you want to make the point that the Lisp builtin function currently called 'eql' should have been called 'eq', and the function currently called 'eq' should have been called 'identical-objects-p' or some such long and explicit name. Formally this makes no difference, of course, but as a practical matter it makes erroneous usage of the latter much less likely and easier to spot.
> It causes difficulties when you want to reason rigorously about your code.
In practice, these are relatively minor. Consider for example my FSet collections library. One of the preconditions in the contract of each FSet operation is, of course, that the invariant required for correct operation holds on the object(s) on which the operation is invoked. Suppose we have proven, for each operation, that it correctly implements its contract: if the invariant holds on the argument(s), it holds on the return value.
So now we have an application, a complete program that uses FSet as a library. Among the many things we need to prove is that the preconditions of each FSet operation used in the application are satisfied. Because we've already proven that the FSet operations maintain the required invariant, we need to prove that nothing else in the program breaks that invariant. In a language with unbreakable access control, this would be trivial: no other code has access to the internals of these data structures. In Common Lisp, we have a little more work to do. We have to show that no other code invokes the FSet internal accessors by name; a few calls to 'grep' suffice for this. Then we have to show that there's no chance the code uses Lisp's reflective features to invoke these accessors indirectly: specifically, that no calls to 'intern' exist in the program that could return a symbol that names one of these accessors. This is probably easy. If the program calls 'intern' at all, it probably passes a constant string as the name of the package to intern into, so all we need to show is that that string is not equal to "FSET". If the package name is not constant, this starts to get a little harder, but (a) this is a rare case, and (b) if we can't easily prove that the possible package names come from a small, restricted set, the program probably has a security vulnerability and needs to be fixed anyway.
That's nonzero effort, I concede. But on the scale of all the things we have to do to verify our application, it's fairly trivial.
By way of contrast, let's look at what happens in languages where the default integer type has bounded precision. Now, to figure out the range of inputs over which some procedure satisfies its desired contract, we have to work backwards from each integer operation, looking at the range of values that would cause it to overflow, and figuring out what constraints that places on the inputs. This task can be quite difficult in complicated cases, and even in simple ones, the need to do it is easily overlooked (as shown by a famous example [0]).
I note that even your beloved SML doesn't mandate arbitrary-precision integers [1]. I can't even find, on its Web site, anything saying whether SML/NJ has them or not. Perhaps they are now considered a de facto requirement for a usable SML implementation -- in which case, you see, culture matters.
Look. Formal verifiability is a concern of mine too, and I understand where you're coming from. But this is not a black-and-white world, and practical considerations are also relevant. While language (mis)features do sometimes contribute to the difficulty of verification, most of that difficulty, I strongly suspect, comes from the complexity of the code itself. We could verify machine language programs if we wanted to, and though it would be harder, I can't believe it would be overwhelmingly harder.
[0] https://research.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all...
You can have identity equality in Standard ML (resp. Haskell) too, it's just a matter of using the right types: a `foo` (resp. `Foo`) has structural equality, but a `foo ref` (resp. `IORef Foo`) has object identity equality. More precisely, equality is always structural, and identity equality is the right notion of structural equality for reference cells. So absolutely nothing is lost w.r.t. what you have in Lisp or Python. And you gain actual compound values.
> In practice, these are relatively minor. Consider for example my FSet collections library. One of the preconditions in the contract of each FSet operation is, of course, that the invariant required for correct operation holds on the object(s) on which the operation is invoked. Suppose we have proven, for each operation, that it correctly implements its contract: if the invariant holds on the argument(s), it holds on the return value.
Have you ever actually proving things about code? It's far from a “minor thing” when every operation has unchecked preconditions that you need to manually verify every time you call a function. The only reason why I can prove things about my code at a reasonable scale is that I arrange things so that I have to manually prove relatively little, and the rest automatically follows from type safety and parametricity.
> (next paragraph)
You use the word “probably” a lot. An argument that uses the word “probably” can't convince me that a proposition is true in all of the cases.
> I note that even your beloved SML doesn't mandate arbitrary-precision integers [1].
Hand-rolling big integers using machine integers as the starting point is easy in Standard ML. The final step is very important: Using abstract types, I hide the representation of big integers from the rest of the program. As far as clients care, they are using big integers, not lists of machine integers, vectors of machine integers, or whatever. Unfortunately, this final step is impossible to perform in Lisp.
> I can't even find, on its Web site, anything saying whether SML/NJ has them or not.
I don't use SML/NJ, because it has a lot of broken extensions that are difficult to reason about, and it uses a questionable external language to automate builds, rather than SML itself. Instead I use Poly/ML and Moscow ML. Both have big integers.
> Perhaps they are now considered a de facto requirement for a usable SML implementation -- in which case, you see, culture matters.
Big integers are great help, but they aren't considered a de facto requirement. The only requirements are those in the Definition of Standard ML and the Standard ML Basis Library. As I said above, using abstract types, you can roll your own non-leaky big integer abstraction.
> While language (mis)features do sometimes contribute to the difficulty of verification, most of that difficulty, I strongly suspect, comes from the complexity of the code itself.
And the complexity of the code itself comes from the discrepancy between your problem domain and what you can readily express in your programming language.
> We could verify machine language programs if we wanted to, and though it would be harder, I can't believe it would be overwhelmingly harder.
Well, you are overwhelmingly wrong, unless you hand-wave away a significant chunk of your proof obligation.
Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_list#Singly_linked_list...
If this interests you, read also about tree structures such as red-black trees. These kinds of structures support all operations that mutable structures support in O(log n) time. Of course mutable structures can always be faster, but immutable structures are far better than linear time.
For the benefit of the GP, what might be non-obvious about the way colanderman describes this, is that if you want lists that are cell-immutable but are resizeable with O(1) push() and pop(), you do your pushing and popping off the front of the list. So the pointer to the old list is still a valid pointer to its previous state. And at this point, yeah, go off and read the WP link. :)
There are better choices for general-purpose functional lists.
list.append(x)
list = list.withLast(x)
There is a small literature within computer science on efficient implementations of functional data structures. While some tricks are involved, I think it's safe to say it's a solved problem, thanks to people like Chris Okasaki and Phil Bagwell.
It didn't. There's frozenset as well. There's been discussion of an immutable dict every so often, but the conclusion is generally that it's unnecessary.
The reason to have an immutable sequence is mostly to serve as dict keys. Same with an immutable set. If you use a mutable sequence as a dict key, you create ambiguity over whether you care about the memory location or the value of the sequence.
1. TLA+ doesn't conflate the two at all. On the contrary: it has neither. TLA+'s data is based on set theory, and has syntax sugar for mathematical sequences, defined in TLA+ as functions from a prefix of the natural numbers to some set. I don't know what either "lists" or "tuples" are mathematically (in terms of set theory), and neither does TLA+. Like ordinary formal math, TLA+ has only sets (and functions, which are theoretically also encoded sets). Everything else can be defined in those terms. If, you come up with a mathematical definition of either or both, you can use it in TLA+. If the definition is the same for both, they won't will be the same; if it isn't -- they won't.
2. Like "ordinary" math, TLA+ has no type system at all. But you're right that any program property can be described in its simple logic. E.g., you can have a sequence whose all elements are natural numbers, except the prime indices, which are strings:
∀ n ∈ DOMAIN seq : seq[n] ∈ (IF IsPrime(n) THEN STRING ELSE Nat)
seq ∈ Nat × STRING × Real
One more important difference between tuple and list that's worth knowing about: syntax. Ned makes it seem like tuples have the syntax "(x, y)", but they actually have the syntax "x, y".
I find that a lot of Python programmers, even long-time ones, don't realize this important difference. It's what allows one to write code constructions like "x, y = 1, 2" or "return 1, 2".
One needs the parentheses only to "clarify" this syntax in certain cases; for example, as dict keys, the parens are necessary -- "x = {(1, 2): 2}". Although interestingly, for dict lookup, they are not -- "x[1, 2] == 2".
One way I remind myself of this rule is to realize that "x = 1," is the same as "x = (1,)", but "x = (1)" is actually the same as "x = 1". This is quite different from lists, who are syntactically defined by the "[]" brackets, and thus you require them, or a "list()" call, whenever you make lists, making it just that much more heavyweight as a data structure.
Namedtuples are wonderful! It's like a class with only attributes, except you don't have to define a new class and get slapped across the back of your head by more experienced programmers for creating a useless class. Access objects by index, by name, or by iteration. It's very versatile.
that said, writing generic code that works transparently with both namedtuple values and objects can be a bit irritating: e.g. you might want to derive a new value/object from an existing value/object that updates one of the attributes of the value/object.
class Foo(namedtuple('Foo', (...)):
def __repr__(self):
...
__slots__ = ()
Oh, if only it were so simple! Python itself doesn't understand what the heck tuples are, in that the built-in functions often treat tuples as simply "immutable lists". See isinstance() and issubclass() functions, which expect what's meant to be a list of classes, but you need to pass a tuple. *args is another such example, as the article mentions.
If what Python calls tuples were the thing with structure instead of order, they wouldn't be iterable.
grid[(1,1)] = TrueAlso you can write this as `grid[1, 1] = True`
The following trivial example shows that, at least for very small lists and tuples, except for the fixed overhead of 16 bytes for a tuple vs. 72 bytes for a list they're the same [edit: no it doesn't. I wasn't looking at the diff between a 1-element and 2-element tuple]:
Perhaps there's more to it?
>>> from sys import getsizeof
>>> list = [94]
>>> getsizeof(list)
80
>>> list = [94, 37]
>>> getsizeof(list)
88
>>> list = [94, 37, 21]
>>> getsizeof(list)
96
>>> list = [94, 37, 21, 19]
>>> getsizeof(list)
104
>>> tuple = (94)
>>> getsizeof(tuple)
24
>>> tuple = (94, 37)
>>> getsizeof(tuple)
72
>>> tuple = (94, 37, 21)
>>> getsizeof(tuple)
80
>>> tuple = (94, 37, 21, 19)
>>> getsizeof(tuple)
88 >>> tuple = (94,)
>>> getsizeof(tuple)
64 #!/usr/bin/python
from sys import getsizeof
from random import sample
from time import time
l = sample(xrange(10000), 10000)
t = tuple(l)
print "The tuple's size is " + str(getsizeof(t)) + " and the list's size is " + str(getsizeof(l))
s = time()
z = 0
for x in l:
z += x
print "Iterating through a 10,000 element list took " + str(time() - s) + " seconds."
s = time()
z = 0
for x in t:
z += x
print "Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took " + str(time() - s) + " seconds."
doug@supermicro:~$ ./x
The tuple's size is 80056 and the list's size is 80072
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.00589299201965 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.00538778305054 seconds.
doug@supermicro:~$ ./x
The tuple's size is 80056 and the list's size is 80072
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.00553607940674 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.00536203384399 seconds. C:\Temp>python listtuple.py
The tuple's size is 80048 and the list's size is 80064
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.0005006790161132812 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.0005006790161132812 seconds.
C:\Temp>python listtuple.py
The tuple's size is 80048 and the list's size is 80064
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.0020074844360351562 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.001031637191772461 seconds.
C:\Temp>python listtuple.py
The tuple's size is 80048 and the list's size is 80064
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.0 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.001001596450805664 seconds. mb:~ doug$ ./listtuple
The tuple's size is 40028 and the list's size is 40036
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.00113916397095 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.00111603736877 seconds.
mb:~ doug$ ./listtuple
The tuple's size is 40028 and the list's size is 40036
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.00126791000366 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.00133585929871 seconds.
mb:~ doug$ ./listtuple
The tuple's size is 40028 and the list's size is 40036
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.00114607810974 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.00117492675781 seconds.Because Python is so dynamic, you can't make lists or tuples much better. However, in a static language (like Java or OCaml), you can greatly shrink the size of "cultural" lists by hoisting the (identical) run-time type info out of the elements and into the container. (OCaml does this with floats.) And "cultural" tuples typically can use much simpler implementations, since their sizes are fixed and known at compile time. (C structs are often optimized away entirely in optimized assembly.)
The way you look at a statement like (a,b) = (2,3) is that this is a normal assignment, where you imagine there are one value flowing in the equal sign, from right to left. But it happens to contain two values within its wrap.
In the case of the mutable initial value problem, that's just a choice of semantics (in my opinion, a very bad choice). Without having looked at the implementation, I would assume that if you have no backwards-compatibility concerns, a fix would take a few minutes.
In the case of sets/frozensets, most Python programmers want their sets to be mutable, in a syntax-sugar-y way that's incompatible with using functional persistent data structures.
> most Python programmers want their sets to be mutable
They're accustomed to mutable sets because those are all they've known. But ask a Clojure programmer how they feel about functional collections, and you'll be told they're fine. Functional collections are actually easier to use because you don't have to worry about unintended aliasing.
And functional behavior is not strange at all. No programming language I have ever used (and it's a long list) has used shared, mutable semantics for numbers. Consider, in C:
int a = 3;
int b = a;
b++;
For example:
> Another conflict between the Technical and the Cultural: there are places in Python itself where a tuple is used when a list makes more sense. When you define a function with args, args is passed to you as a tuple, even though the position of the values isn't significant, at least as far as Python knows
This is the C behavior of tuple usage being exposed to the Python side. If one explores the C API it becomes clear that an implementation detail of C is being exposed to Python.
> The Cultural Difference is about how lists and tuples are actually used: lists are used where you have a homogenous sequence of unknown length; tuples are used where you know the number of elements in advance because the position of the element is semantically significant.
Here the Culture has moved away from the Technical roots of Python and now they're at odds. On the C side tuples are not* just used when the length is known ahead of time - tuples are not always immutable on the C side.
The context is important if you really want to understand.