Using tuples correctly?

[Robert Brewer]

BJörn Lindqvist wrote:
> I like tuples alot. But in some situations you seem to be forced to
> access the elements of a tuple via its indexes and that is pretty
> ugly. For example:
> 
> # make_color() returns a rgb tuple (r, g, b). I.e. (255, 0, 0)
> print "The red value is: ", make_color()[0]
> 
> Not nice at all. It is maybe OK for a rgb tuple that only has three
> elements, but for a tuple that has 10+ elements, index access is
> rediculous. In that case, unpacking wont helpe either. What you would
> like to write is:
> 
> print "The red value is: ", make_color().r
>8
> After some more browsing of the Python Cookbook and googling it seems
> like lots of people is trying to emulate structs on the fly in python.
> So why aren't there a tuple-with-named-attributes type in python?

The tuple-with-named-attributes is called a 'class' in Python.

class RGB(object):
    def __init__(self, r=0, g=0, b=0):
        self.red = r
        self.green = g
        self.blue = b

> So you could write stuff like this:
> 
> return (r: 10, g: 20, b: 30) or maybe return (.r 10, .g 20, .b 30)

color = RGB(10, 20, 30)
print "The red value is: ", color.red

If you *must* have a tuple to throw around, give your class a 'tuple' method:

class RGB(object):
    def __init__(self, r=0, g=0, b=0):
        self.red = r
        self.green = g
        self.blue = b
    
    def tuple(self):
        return (self.r, self.g, self.b)


Why bother to shoehorn all of the name scaffolding into tuples when it's already present in classes?


Robert Brewer
MIS
Amor Ministries
fumanchu at amor.org