[Tutor] Classes Turn Strings Into Tuples for some reason

[Danny Yoo]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Liam Clarke wrote:

> Hi John
>
> This part here...
>  self.name = name,
>
> The comma tells Python that self.name is a tuple, similar to
> x=(4,5,6,7,) would.


Yes, exactly.  Python's syntax is a bit permissive when it comes to using
tuples.  For example, both:

    (x, y, z) = ('henry', 'richard', 'john')

and:

    x, y, z = 'henny', 'richard', 'john'

do the same thing: the two statements both do a "tuple assignment". And in
the second case, Python can figure out that we are doing tuple assignment,
even without the parentheses.


As a variation of this, we can also do:

    kings = 'thengel', 'theoden', 'eomer'

or:

    havens = 'lothlorien', 'rivendell'

or even:

    one = 'ring',

This is one of the few places where I think this particular permissive
syntax --- optional parentheses for tuples --- might not have been such a
good idea: I think that the mandatory parentheses would improve the
readability of the language.  But since it's in the language, we'd better
be aware of it.