Help understanding the decisions *behind* python?

[Emmanuel Surleau]

On Friday 31 July 2009 19:49:04 Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> On Jul 20, 9:27 am, Phillip B Oldham <phillip.old... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Specifically the "differences" between lists and tuples have us
> > confused and have caused many "discussions" in the office. We
> > understand that lists are mutable and tuples are not, but we're a
> > little lost as to why the two were kept separate from the start. They
> > both perform a very similar job as far as we can tell.
>
> The underlying C code for the two is substantially the same.  In terms
> of code, tuples are in effect just immutable lists that have the
> added
> feature of being hashable (and therefore usable as dictionary keys or
> elements of sets).
>
> Beyond the mutable/hashable distinction, there is an important
> philosophical distinction articulated by Guido.  He deems tuples
> to be useful for struct like groupings of non-homogenous fields
> and lists to be useful for sequences of homogenous data suitable
> for looping.
>
> While nothing in the list/tuple code requires you to make that
> distinction,
> it is important because that philosophy pervades the language.  If you
> follow Guido's direction, you'll find that the various parts of the
> language fit together better.  Do otherwise and you'll be going
> against
> the grain.

I might be wrong, but I get the impression that many people don't indeed "get 
it" and use tuples as static arrays and lists when the array needs to be 
dynamically resized. This is certainly how I use them as well.

This would tend to show that Guido's notion here was not particularly 
intuitive.

Cheers,

Emm