Exceptions, assigning a tuple

[Erik Max Francis]

Derek Fountain wrote:

> And that's the final piece of the puzzle! I can now claim to
> understand it.
> Many thanks.

Sure thing.  By the way, that little explanation is a hint at one of the
key insights to Python.  A lot of features in Python work like that --
you don't have to provide dedicated support for a certain builtin
function to do its work (e.g., using the `tuple' function to make a
tuple out of an arbitrary object), you only need to make the object
conform to the relevant interface.  In this case, it was the iteration
interface -- tuple will work with any object that can be iterated over. 
So exactly the same property that allows you to write:

	for x in myObject:
	    ...

is precisely the same one that makes

	tuple(myObject)

meaningful and do what you'd expect.  For instance, to get a file-like
object, you don't actually need a literal file object (created with
`file'), you just need something that has the relevant methods (read,
readlines, write, writelines, flush, close, or a subset).  Often these
sorts of interfaces are orthogonal, so that's why you saw that native
file objects actually can behave as iteratable objects as well -- all
they need to do is support read/write/flush/close and __getitem__ in the
expected way (start from 0, raise IndexError when you're done).

-- 
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