[New-bugs-announce] [issue44768] dataclasses.dataclass and collections.namedtuple do the same thing

[pavel-lexyr]

New submission from pavel-lexyr <pavel at lexyr.com>:

PEP 20 states:

> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

As of right now, two very similar constructions for making a lightweight dataclass exist in Python.

collections.namedtuple is one of them. dataclasses.dataclass is the other*.

The behaviour they provide is very similar. And with the functions .astuple() and the `frozen` constructor argument of the dataclass, one could consider it to be almost a direct superset of the namedtuple.


Having two different classes with very similar behaviour is not considered a good practice. I propose merging the two classes' features into one and to deprecate the other, to prevent unnecessary ambiguity.


* To get deeper into semantics, we might consider types.SimpleNamespace to be the third. This is out of this issue's scope - the reader is welcome to follow up in another one.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 398421
nosy: eric.smith, pavel-lexyr, rhettinger
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: dataclasses.dataclass and collections.namedtuple do the same thing
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.10, Python 3.11, Python 3.6, Python 3.7, Python 3.8, Python 3.9

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue44768>
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