Collections of non-arbitrary objects ?

[Paddy]

On Jun 23, 1:45 am, walterbyrd <walterb... at iname.com> wrote:
> On Jun 21, 5:38 pm, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-s... at benfinney.id.au>
> wrote:
>
> > That's a flippant response, but I don't understand the question.
>
> Everybody here seems to have about the same response: "why would you
> ever want to do that?"
>
> Maybe it's something that doesn't "need" to be done, but it seems to
> me that would give you a certain level of built-in integrity - you
> could be sure about what's in the structure. I would not expect that
> all of python would be that rigid, but I thought it might be
> worthwhile if there were one such structure.
>
> Think of this: why use tuples when lists are available? You can use a
> tuple to index a dictionary, but  not a list - why? I the answer may
> be that sometimes you want some degree on inherent enforced structure.
> I'm sure the language could have designed to allow lists to index
> dictionary, but you would have to awfully careful with those lists.
> The burden would be on the programmer to make certain that those lists
> didn't change. But, it could be done, therefore tuples are not
> "needed" right?
>
> Languages like C are often criticized as being too rigid - you have to
> pre-define your variables, and pre-allocate your array sizes. But,
> languages like Perl and BASIC, are often criticized as being  to
> sloppy - too few restrictions tend to lead to sloppy code. So I guess
> there is a sort of trade-off.
>
> I suppose I could use a database, that might give me some degree of
> assured integrity - depending on what database I used.

Hi Walterbyrd,
What happens when you are given good advice that may be contrary to
intuition?

Unfortunately its how we usually do things in Python and do NOT
suffer because of it. Try writing your application without it. Test
without it. Write other applications without it. Others do,
successfully.

- Paddy.