Named tuples and projection

[MRAB]

On Jun 20, 9:38 am, Giuseppe Ottaviano <giu... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I found the namedtuple very convenient for rapid prototyping code, for  
> functions that have to return a number of results that could grow as  
> the code evolves. They are more elegant than dicts, and I don't have  
> to create a new explicit class. Unfortunately in this situation they  
> lose the convenience of tuple unpacking: changing tuple's parameters  
> would break other functions unpacking the result.
> One solution, with 3.0 syntax, would be unpacking only the used  
> parameters, using always a *rest
> a, b, *rest = f()
> so that if the tuple grows, the code keeps working.
> However I find this confusing (and not avaliable in python 2.5).
> I don't know if similar solutions have been proposed, I came up with  
> this one:
>
[snip]
Provided you don't change the order of the items in the tuple, you can
just use slicing:

a, b = f()[ : 2]