Tuples -- who needs 'em

[Greg Ewing]

Bob Alexander wrote:
> 
> BTW, both tuples and lists are ordered collections of non-homogeneous values
> (i.e. the elements can be if different types).

In Haskell, a statically-typed language which also has
both tuples and lists, the two types play distinctly
different roles, and both are needed. A tuple is a 
fixed-size structure whose elements may be of different 
types, whereas a list is a variable-size structure whose 
elements must be of the *same* type.

This is the way I tend to use them in Python as well --
lists for homogeneous collections, tuples for "records".

If static typing is introduced into Python, a more rigid
distinction may have to be made, in which case we may be
glad that we already have the two kinds of structure.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
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