Why even use a list here? Tuples are for immutable/constant data.
a_tuple_of_words = ("my", "tuple", "of", "words")
or
a_tuple_of_words = "my", "tuple", "of", "words"
a_tuple_of_words = ("my", "tuple", "of", "words")
or
a_tuple_of_words = "my", "tuple", "of", "words"
But yes, Python misses entirely the point of tuples, treating them as read-only lists.
http://dozzie.jogger.pl/2014/04/11/python-tuples-the-useless...
No, a structure is, you know, a structure -- what C calls a struct. Python calls it a namedtuple. If some people call it just a tuple, well, that's a difference in terminology, but it doesn't mean Python is confused about the concepts, it's just using terminology you're not used to.
Also, if we're going to be pedantic about the meaning of data types, your blog post is wrong about lists. You say "position in the list doesn't matter", but that means ordering doesn't matter, and an unordered collection of similar objects is a set, not a list. Python makes this distinction clear: a list is ordered, a set is not.
No, it menas exactly this. The term "tuple" and its use predates Python. Sorry, no banana.
> [...] your blog post is wrong about lists. You say "position in the list doesn't matter", but that means ordering doesn't matter
Oh, so what's the difference in meaning of element True on position 1 and element True on position 20? Position in list doesn't matter if we're talking about meaning of the elements.
References, please? And not mathematical references; programming references. C was using the keyword "struct" long before Python to refer to what you are calling a tuple.
> what's the difference in meaning of element True on position 1 and element True on position 20?
The fact that the index is 1 instead of 20. Both elements have the same type, and might well refer to the same property of some sequence of things; but the index being 1 instead of 20 means the element True is describing that property relative to the first item in some sequence, instead of the 20th item. That's why position in the list makes a difference: the ordering of the items, as well as the type of the items, carries information.
(Of course, in Python the list items don't even have to be of the same type; but most uses of Python lists in practice that I've seen do assume that all the elements are "the same kind of thing".)
ML has had tuples several decades before Python existed.
Lighter-weight, immutable collections have a use case. The code in OP appears to be one where it makes sense. I follow the rule where variables are mutable IFF they need to be mutable.
For the rest of the world, tuples are not immutable lists. They are tuples, i.e. collections of "objects" that could share nothing about their type. Tuples often are not even iterable! (Erlang, Haskell)
The fact that tuples in Python can have as much structure as one wants is derived from dynamic typing, not from the tuples' nature. The same you could say about Python's lists.
This is a really subtle issue. It takes to know more languages to see it clearly.
A typical rule of thumb in Python land is that heterogeneous data probably belongs in a tuple, so practice goes a little further than immutable lists.
I think you could improve your demonstration of the usage in the standard library by examining a random selection of usages to try to find out what is typical. But maybe you already looked at more than you talk about in the article (and I understand that this might not be an interesting use of your time).
> A typical rule of thumb in Python land is that heterogeneous data probably belongs in a tuple, so practice goes a little further than immutable lists.
The problem with Python tuples is it's two things mixed: immutable lists and a container for heterogenous data. It's the same situation as JavaScript's objects.
Would you feel better if they named it "ImmutableList" instead?
(Although I agree with you that statically-typed-language-tuples don't seem to make sense in Python.)
But hey... Python's weird choice of how to name the ImmutableList could be worse, right?
For example, someone could be malicious enough to call their general-purpose associative array a "hash", just because a hashmap (note: not a hash) is a good implementation for large associative arrays. Wow, that'd be hilariously misleading, wouldn't it? Good times!
Or imagine someone was silly enough to name their auto-resizing arrays "vectors", even though in all previously existing contexts a "vector" is a sort of thing which absolutely cannot be meaningfully resized/extended. Ha. Think of the tiny cognitive burden placed on generations of future programmers-who-study-math, trying to juggle these two very-similar-but-distinct concepts, multiplied by the number of such future programmers. Amazing practical joke, right?
/rant
Yes, I would feel better if it was named "ImmutableList" or any other way that is not misleading about the purpose.
1. Iterate over a tuple
2. Convert a list to a tuple
3. Construct a tuple of a length not known at compile-time
Python allows these because "why not?" but it does break their "one and only one way to do it" rule and confuses beginners a hell of a lot.
There are definitely borderline cases. For instance, should a Vector be a list or a tuple? A Vec3 type is obviously a tuple, but a large Vector destined for BLAS is obviously a list.
No, it allows them because the distinction that those restrictions are founded on is only useful in a statically-typed languages, and Python isn't statically typed.
> For instance, should a Vector be a list or a tuple?
A real vector/array should be its own data type (probably implemented in a C, or similar low-level, extension) that happens to implement the interface expected of an indexable, iterable collection, neither a list nor a tuple.
...like Erlang.
There is a deep difference that goes beyond use of tuples in language approach between Python and Erlang here where it comes to types in which Erlang, while dynamically typed, has a deep concern for types in its pattern matching system to make path decisions while Python is very much centered on using dynamic OO techniques -- how objects respond to messages -- to do that.
So I'd still say its the same kind of deep language approach difference at work.
Even in Haskell, though, people often write all kinds of type-class magic to allow "iterating" over a tuple. For example, a Binary instance over a tuple wants to call "put" on each element.
Haskell's (Oleg's) HList is basically a tuple with iteration/list-like operations.