On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 5:16 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:

On 12/15/2011 3:42 PM, Ned Batchelder wrote:

This is another place where Python is inconsistent. We're told, "lists
are for homogenous sequences of varying length, like a C array; tuples
are for heterogenous aggregations of known length, like a C struct."

I have not been told that for several years, and I am pretty sure you will not find any such thing in the current docs. I consider it pretty much obsolete, as the differences that flowed from that idea are gone. In Python 3, tuples have all the non-mutating sequence methods that list does. The situation was much different in 1.4.

I strongly disagree. Being immutable sequences (i.e. homogeneous) is a minor secondary role for tuples. Their primary role remains to hold a small bunch of heterogeneous values -- like namedtuple, but without needing forethought. A good example are dictionary items -- these are (key, value) pairs where for a given dict, the keys are all of the same type (or of a small set of related types) and ditto for the values, but the key type and the value types are unrelated.