f---ing typechecking

[Paul McGuire]

Since tuples are immutable, I think of them as fixed data objects with
some simple sequential structure, as opposed to lists which are much
more dynamically accessible/updateable data containers.  Back in my
relational database design days, I sometimes had to create a primary
key for a table by combining values stored in two or more columns -
neither column value alone was unique, but the combination of them
was, and so made a good retrieval index.  In Python, such data pairs
would be ideally represented with tuples, in support of in-memory data
cacheing or tree indexing - for a given record, the values don't
change, so the immutability of their tupleness doesn't get in the way.

In similar vein, I've used tuples internally in my Python code as
cache keys for function memoizing.  They are WORM structures - write
once, read many - built to represent the cache value, but never
updated.

With this idea of tuples as a data structure, I could reasonably
interpret this:

(1,"abc",3) + [1]

to result in (1,"abc",3,[1]) just as well as (1,"abc",3,1).  But
instead of just picking one, Python complains about this, and so
forces me to explicitly use

(1,"abc",3) + tuple([1])

or

(1,"abc",3) + ([1],)

I don't think tuples are just an academic curiosity, as your post
seems to suggest.

-- Paul