Help understanding the decisions *behind* python?

[Masklinn]

On 3 Aug 2009, at 18:57 , John Nagle wrote:
> Dave Angel wrote:
>> sturlamolden wrote:
>>> On 20 Jul, 18:27, Phillip B Oldham <phillip.old... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Tuples are used for passing arguments to and from a function. Common
>>> use of tuples include multiple return values and optional arguments
>>> (*args).
>
>   That's from Mesa, the Xerox PARC language of the 1970s.
>
>   Mesa used tuples for subroutine arguments in a very straightforward
> way.  Every function took one tuple as an argument, written as  
> parameters
> in parentheses separated by commas.
Most statically typed functional languages seem to do pretty much the  
same: uncurried functions really take a tuple as single argument  
rather than multiple arguments, using pattern matching to make it look  
like multiple arguments. Then again, most of them seem to default to  
curried functions these days, which is nice.