Collections of non-arbitrary objects ?

[walterbyrd]

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.