General question about Python design goals

[Alex Martelli]

Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
   ...
> Presumably because it's necessary to extract the individual values 
> (though os.stat results recently became addressable by attribute name as
> well as by index, and this is an indication of the originally intended
> purpose of tuples).

Yep -- "time tuples" have also become pseudo-tuples (each element can be
accessed by name as well as by index) a while ago, and I believe there's
one more example besides stats and times (but I can't recall which one).

Perhaps, if the tuple type _in general_ allowed naming the items in a
smooth way, that might help users see a tuple as "a kind of
``struct''... which also happens to be immutable".  There are a few such
"supertuples" (with item-naming) in the cookbook, but I wonder if it
might not be worth having such functionality in the standard library
(for this clarification as well as, sometimes, helping the readability
of some user code).


Alex