Suggestions for good programming practices?

[Roy Smith]

"David LeBlanc" <whisper at oz.net> wrote:
> Structs and tuples are different. They're both of the same general category
> of aggregate data, but they are different as Brian notes.

I've come to really dislike using tuples for data structures, and 
instead create small data classes.  Even if the class is no more 
complicated than:

class myData:
   def __init__ (self, foo, bar):
      self.foo = foo
      self.bar = bar

you've added quite a bit of functionality.  First, the code becomes a 
little more self-documenting.  "power = ckt.volts * ckt.amps" is a lot 
easier to read and understand than "power = ckt[0] * ckt[1]".

Secondly, it makes it easier to catch programming errors.  I was working 
with somebody the other day who was using tuples to store data.  His 
program was doing something strange.  When I made him rewrite one of his 
data structures as a simple data class instead of a tuple, the reason 
instantly popped out.  He had gotten confused and was using the wrong 
piece of data.  When he had everything as tuples, it just happily took 
the i'th element of the wrong tuple and gave him garbage.  But, when he 
tried to access an attribute that didn't exist, it immediately raised an 
exception.