[Python-ideas] namedtuple literals [Was: RE a new namedtuple]

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 11:58:44AM +1200, Greg Ewing wrote:

> If we're going to have such a type, I suggest making it a
> pure named-fields object without any tuple aspects. In which
> case "ntuple" wouldn't be the right name for it, and something
> like "record" or "struct" would be better.

Guido's time machine strikes again. 

from types import SimpleNamespace


By the way: records and structs define their fields in a particular 
order too. namedtuple does quite well at modelling records and structs 
in other languages.


> Also, building a whole type object for each combination of
> fields seems like overkill to me. Why not have just one type
> of object with an attribute referencing a name-to-slot
> mapping?

You mean one globally shared mapping for all ntuples? So given:

spam = ntuple(name="fred", age=99)
eggs = ntuple(model=2, colour="green")

we would have spam.colour == 99, and eggs.name == 2.


Personally, I think this whole proposal for implicitly deriving type 
information from the way we instantiate a tuple is a bad idea. I don't 
see this becoming anything other than a frustrating and annoying source 
of subtle, hard to diagnose bugs.


-- 
Steve