Lists and Tuples and Much More

[Scott]

I'm going to start grouping all my questions in one post as this is my 
second today, and sorta makes me feel dumb to keep having to bother you all 
with trivial questions. I'll just seperate my questions with:
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Now onto the issue:
List's and Tuple's
I don't see the distinction between the two.  I mean, I understand that a 
list is mutable and a tuple is immutable.
The thing that I dont understand about them is what, besides that, seperates 
the two.  I did a little experimentation to try to understand it better, but 
only confused myelf more.

A list looks like this:

>>>my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

and a tuple looks like this:

>>>my_tuple = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Now you can add to a list, but not a tuple so:

>>>my_list.append(my_tuple)  #or extend for that matter right?
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)]

Is that pretty much accurate? And which is better on resources....I'm 
guessing a tuple seeing as it doesn't change.

And the last example brings up another question.  What's the deal with a 
tupple that has a list in it such as:

>>>my_tupple = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, [6, 7, 8, 9])

Now I read somewhere that you could change the list inside that tupple.  But 
I can't find any documentation that describes HOW to do it.  The only things 
I CAN find on the subject say, "Don't do it because its more trouble than 
it's worth."  But that doesn't matter to me, because I want to know 
everything.
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Now there comes append.  I read everywhere that append only add's 1 element 
to the end of your list.  But if you write:
>>> my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
>>> my_list.append([7, 8, 9, 10])
>>> my_list
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, [7, 8, 9, 10]]

Is that because list's, no matter what they contain, are counted as 1 
element?

And how would you sort the list that's in the list?  I guess that goes in 
conjunction with the section above, but still:
>>> my_list = [6, 4, 3, 5, 2, 1]
>>> my_list.append([7, 9, 8, 10])
>>> my_list.sort()
>>> my_list
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, [7, 9, 8, 10]]

This is, again, something I'm finding nothing on.
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Maybe I'm just not looking in the right spots.  The only things I have as 
learning aids are: this newsgroup ;p, http://diveintopython.org, 
http://python.org/, Beggining Python: From Novice to Professional,  and (now 
don't laugh) Python for Dummies.