Help understanding the decisions *behind* python?

[Uncle Roastie]

On Jul 20, 12:27 pm, Phillip B Oldham <phillip.old... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> My colleagues and I have been working with python for around 6 months
> now, and while we love a lot of what python has done for us and what
> it enables us to do some of the decisions behind such certain
> data-types and their related methods baffle us slightly (when compared
> to the decisions made in other, similarly powerful languages).
>
> Specifically the "differences" between lists and tuples have us
> confused and have caused many "discussions" in the office. We
> understand that lists are mutable and tuples are not, but we're a
> little lost as to why the two were kept separate from the start. They
> both perform a very similar job as far as we can tell.
>
> Consider the following:
>
> >>> x = [2,1,3]
> >>> x.sort()
> >>> print x
>
> [1, 2, 3]
>
> Now, if the sort operations were unable to affect the original
> structure of the list (as in JavaScript) you'd effectively have a
> tuple which you could add/remove from, and the example above would
> look more like:
>
> >>> x = [2,1,3]
> >>> print x.sort()
> [1, 2, 3]
> >>> print x
>
> [2,1,3]
>
> This make a lot more sense to us, and follows the convention from
> other languages. It would also mean chaining methods to manipulate
> lists would be easier:
>
> >>> x = [2,1,3]
> >>> print x.sort()[0]
> 3
> >>> print x
>
> [2,1,3]
>
> We often find we need to do manipulations like the above without
> changing the order of the original list, and languages like JS allow
> this. We can't work out how to do this in python though, other than
> duplicating the list, sorting, reversing, then discarding.
>
> We're not looking to start any arguments or religious wars and we're
> not asking that python be changed into something its not. We'd simply
> like to understand the decision behind the lists and tuple structures.
> We feel that in not "getting" the difference between the two types we
> may be missing out on using these data structures to their full
> potential.

A tuple can be used like a struct in C - the number of fields is meant
to
be fixed and should not be dynamically changed.