Problem of Readability of Python

[Licheng Fang]

Python is supposed to be readable, but after programming in Python for
a while I find my Python programs can be more obfuscated than their C/C
++ counterparts sometimes. Part of the reason is that with
heterogeneous lists/tuples at hand, I tend to stuff many things into
the list and *assume* a structure of the list or tuple, instead of
declaring them explicitly as one will do with C structs. So, what used
to be

struct nameval {
    char * name;
   int val;
} a;

a.name = ...
a.val = ...

becomes cryptic

a[0] = ...
a[1] = ...

Python Tutorial says an empty class can be used to do this. But if
namespaces are implemented as dicts, wouldn't it incur much overhead
if one defines empty classes as such for some very frequently used
data structures of the program?

Any elegant solutions?