[Python-Dev] List vs Tuple / Homogeneous vs Heterogeneous / Mutable vs Immutable

[Nick Coghlan]

On 18 April 2014 04:21, Jeff Allen <ja.py at farowl.co.uk> wrote:
>
> The "think of tuples like a struct in C" explanation immediately reminded me
> that ...
>
> On 16/04/2014 21:42, Taavi Burns wrote (in his excellent notes from the
> language summit):
>
>  The demographics have changed. How do
> we change the docs and ecosystem to avoid the assumption that Python
> programmers already know how to program in C?
>
> Good question. My version was going to be that if you are dealing with
> tuples of mixed data like (name, age, shoesize), inserting something or
> sorting, in the way a list can, would confuse your code. A list, you almost
> always iterate over, to do the same thing with each member, and that only
> works if they are the same type of thing.
>
> Then I realised David Beazley had explained this (but better), starting in
> the Tuples section of his "Python Essential Reference". With permission,
> this could perhaps be adopted wherever it best fits in the documentation.

This is the kind of "competence to mastery" transition my "Python
User's Reference" was designed to cover, but the book contract fell
through, and I was never able to interest anyone in rescuing the
material from the ODF manuscript and migrating it to Sphinx after I
donated it to the PSF:
http://svn.python.org/view/sandbox/trunk/userref/

(It's also all 2.5 era docs, so would need a fair bit of work to bring
it up to date for 2.7 and 3.4)

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia