terminological obscurity

[Arthur]

On Sat, 22 May 2004 07:21:06 -0000, "Donn Cave" <donn at drizzle.com>
wrote:

>Quoth Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com>:
>...
>| I think the fact that Python lists can be heterogogenous is one
>| of the most brilliantly useful things in the language, but
>| apparently we're not supposed to use lists like that.  Since
>| tuples aren't mutable, I'm completely at a loss as to how we're
>| supposed to deal with mutable heterogenous sequences.
>
>You'll have to either try to understand what people mean, or ignore
>them.  Either will work better than the above.  A heterogeneous
>sequence can mean at least two things, not because there's anything
>ambiguous about "heterogeneous" on its own, but because of the way
>it's applied to the sequence.  The notion that this is a distinctive
>difference between lists and tuples is ridiculous if you take one
>of those meanings, sensible if you take the other.  Your choice.

I  think I am perfectly capable of making sense of the explanation
that uses the unambigous words heterogenous and homogenous in the
context of this discussion.  

But the ambiguous word in the previous sentence, IMO, is
"explanation".  Because in the end - I am repeating myself - I find,
with emphasis given these words - a  tautolofgy parading as an
explanation.

Art