"Martin v. Loewis" wrote:
Wouldn't it make sense to expose this object in Python, e.g. by contructing it from a dictionary of string mappings ?
(The type constructor is not made available in bltinmodule.c.)
No. AFAIR, this idea was explicitly rejected at the time the patch was designed (see the comments on the stat patch for the exact history).
The rationale was that it is easy enough to create a class that doubles as tuple in Python yourself (perhaps through inheritance from tuple), so there would be no need to expose this type.
Hmm, isn't the trick with this type that you can access the various elements as attributes *and* using index notation ? Also, why should we hide something useful from the Python programmer if it's there anyway ? (One thing I've always wondered about is why Python doesn't expose Py_True and Py_False through the builtin module...) I guess, I'll add a constructor to mx.Tools, my repository for missing builtins ;-) -- Marc-Andre Lemburg CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH ______________________________________________________________________ Consulting & Company: http://www.egenix.com/ Python Software: http://www.lemburg.com/python/