Passing a callable object to Thread

[Jeff Schwab]

Lie wrote:
> On Feb 16, 12:29 pm, Jeff Schwab <j... at schwabcenter.com> wrote:
>> Paul Rubin wrote:
>>> Jeff Schwab <j... at schwabcenter.com> writes:
>>>> Why not?  They seem intuitive to me.  I would find it weird if you
>>>> couldn't have 0-tuple, and even weirder if you couldn't have a
>>>> 1-tuple.   Maybe my brain has been warped by too much C++ code.
>>> The idea is that a 2-tuple (of numbers, say) is a pair of numbers, a
>>> 3-tuple is three numbers, and a 1-tuple is one number.  That would
>>> mean a number and a 1-tuple of numbers are the same thing, not
>>> separate types.
>> No, that doesn't follow.  A set with one element is not the same thing
>> as that element, a sequence of one element is not the same thing as that
>> element, and a tuple with one element is not the same thing as that element.
> 
> Probably the analogue of tuples in human language would be like this:
> A: What ice-cream flavour do you have?
> B: "Vanilla", "Chocolate", and "Strawberry"
> 
> If, for example, he only have Vanilla:
> A: What ice-cream flavour do you have?
> B: "Vanilla"
> 
> This way of thinking makes 1-tuple the same as the element itself.

Yes.  I first heard the term "tuple" in a physics class, where it was 
used to mean that a mathematical function took an arbitrary number of 
objects.  It was by analog with "triple, quadruple, quintuple... 
n-tuple."  That's a different context than computer science, though, 
which is a specific branch of mathematics with its own terminology.  In 
CS, a tuple is a kind of data structure that is specifically not 
identical with any of its elements.  That's the sort of tuple used in 
Python.