[Python-ideas] Anonymous namedtuples

[Paul Moore]

On 19 April 2016 at 15:26, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2016, at 06:25, Paul Moore wrote:
>> Possibly the docs for namedtuple should refer the user to
>> SimpleNamespace as an alternative if "being a tuple subclass" isn't an
>> important requirement.
>
> Just my two cents - for the use cases that I would find this useful for
> (I usually end up just using tuple), a hashable "FrozenSimpleNamespace"
> would be nice. Or even one that has immutable key fields that are used
> as the basis for the hash but that you can hang other values off of
> (SemiFrozen?)

Having done some digging just now... SimpleNamespace is basically just
exposing for end users, the type that is used to build the
sys.implementation object. The definition is *literally* nothing more
than

    SimpleNamespace = type(sys.implementation)

Variations such as you suggest may indeed be useful, but the existing
implementation was essentially a free benefit of "we use this one
ourselves in the core". Going beyond that, any additional types
probably need to justify themselves a bit better - and at that point
the usual "publish on PyPI as a standalone module and see how useful
they turn out to be" suggestion probably applies.

Paul