Interesting article. I've always heard that about lists and tuples, but this article made me wonder how much less efficient with storage is a list.

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