[Python-ideas] A subclassing API for named tuples?

[Nick Coghlan]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 5:07 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:11:38 -0800
> Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:
>> On 02/14/2013 05:19 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> > A recurring suggestion for collections.namedtuple is that it would be
>> > nice to be able to define them like this [...]
>>
>> FWIW, I think namedtuple is overused.  Not that there's anything
>> innately wrong with namedtuple; it's just that I think too many types
>> are iterable which shouldn't be.  (Nobody unpacks the stat_result
>> anymore, that's like 1995 man.)  I suggest people use
>> types.SimpleNamespace unless iterability is specifically required.
>
> There are tons of cases where tuple unpacking is a very convenient API.

Indeed. In particular, consuming namespaces from an iterator is
substantially more annoying than consuming a tuple.

I'd put the size cutoff for switching over to a namespace somewhere
around the 5 item mark. At 2-3, the tuple is often clearly superior,
at 4 it's arguable, at 5, unpacking starts to get a bit hard to read.

Cheers,
Nick.

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