Unicode Objects in Tuples

[Ned Batchelder]

On 10/12/13 2:20 AM, Ian Kelly wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 7:31 AM, Stephen Tucker <stephen_tucker at sil.org> wrote:
>> On the original question, well, I accept Ned's answer (at 10.22). I also
>> like the idea of a helper function given by Peter Otten at 09.51. It still
>> seems like a crutch to help poor old Python 2.X to do what any programmer
>> (or, at least the programmers like me :-)  ) think it ought to be able to by
>> itself. The distinction between the "geekiness" of a tuple compared with the
>> "non-geekiness" of a string is, itself, far too geeky for my liking. The
>> distinction seems to be an utterly spurious - even artificial or arbitrary
>> one to me. (Sorry about the rant.)
> I agree, and that's not how I would explain the distinction.  The str
> of an object is meant to be human-readable, while the repr of an
> object is meant to be something that could be pasted into the
> interpreter to reconstruct the object.  In the case of tuples, the
> repr of the tuple uses the reprs of the components because the
> resulting string will more likely be acceptable to the interpreter,
> and the str of the tuple is the same as the repr because there is no
> convincing reason why it should be different.

This idea that the repr can reconstruct the object always fell flat with 
me since the vast majority of classes don't have a repr that works that 
way.  I look at it a little differently: the repr is meant to be as 
unambiguous as possible to a developer.  It turns out that Python 
literal syntax is really good at that, so where possible, that's what's 
used.   But most classes don't make an attempt to create a Python 
expression, because that's very difficult, and in fact, the literal 
syntax may not be useful:

     >>> object()
     <object object at 0x1088bb0d0>

Here, the valid Python syntax is "object()", but that's useless as a 
repr, because it doesn't help you distinguish between two instances.

In fact, you say repr could be used to "reconstruct the object", but 
really what you mean is "reconstruct an equal object".  There is no way 
to construct an equal object(), so right at the root of the Python 
object hierarchy, repr doesn't even attempt it.

--Ned.