Differences creating tuples and collections.namedtuples

[John Reid]

On 18/02/13 14:15, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
> On 18 February 2013 14:09, John Reid <j.reid at mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk> wrote:
>> On 18/02/13 12:11, Dave Angel wrote:
>>> On 02/18/2013 06:47 AM, John Reid wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I was hoping namedtuples could be used as replacements for tuples in
>>>> all instances. There seem to be some differences between how tuples
>>>> and namedtuples are created. For example with a tuple I can do:
>>>>
>>>> a=tuple([1,2,3])
>>>>
>>>> with namedtuples I get a TypeError:
>>>>
>>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>>> B=namedtuple('B', 'x y z')
>>>> b=B([1,2,3])
>>>
>>> You are passing a single list to the constructor, but you specified that
>>> the namedtuple was to have 3 items.  So you need two more.
>>
>> I'm aware how to construct the namedtuple and the tuple. My point was
>> that they use different syntaxes for the same operation and this seems
>> to break ipython. I was wondering if this is a necessary design feature
>> or perhaps just an oversight on the part of the namedtuple author or
>> ipython developers.
> 
> I would say that depending on isinstance(obj, tuple) was the error. I
> can't offer a suggestion as you haven't clarified what the purpose of
> this code in canSequence() is or what constraints it is expected to
> satisfy.
> 

Like I said it is not my code. I'm hoping the IPython developers can
help me out here. That said it would be nice to know the rationale for
namedtuple.__new__ to have a different signature to tuple.__new__. I'm
guessing namedtuple._make has a similar interface to tuple.__new__. Does
anyone know what the rationale was for this design?