On Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 05:02:23PM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote: > On Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 4:38 PM Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > > > Right-o, the old "heterogeneous tuples versus homogeneous lists" > > distinction, I remember that from the old 1.5 days. I haven't heard it > > mentioned for a long time! > > > > You must not have looked at type annotations then. :-)
Not closely enough to draw the connection unprompted, no. Thanks for the reminder. > Type annotations > legitimize this, by favoring the syntax list[int] for a homogeneous list > versus tuple[int, str, bool] for a heterogeneous tuple. (There's a syntax > for a homogeneous tuple too, but it's intentionally slightly longer.) This makes sense. > So this rule of thumb is definitely not dead (as you seemed to imply). What I actually said: "That certainly remains a reasonable guideline to make, albeit less so today" (and then gave reasons why less so). I explicitly agreed that it still is a good distinction to make. It is a particularly egregiously unfair misrepresentation to say I "seemed to imply" otherwise. That's not cool. Another factor in favour of the heterogeneous vs homogeneous distinction is the practical difficulty in working with complex data structures made from tuples, due to their immutability. I've just spent some time using an API that represents data as nested tuples, and due to their immutability they can be a pain to assemble. Nested lists are much easier. It's okay if you know your data up front and can write it as a nested tuple display, but if you need to assemble it dynamically, it is not fun. Would not recommend. Fortunately it's my own API and so I can take a flame thrower to it and replace it with something better :-) -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/M4DRP2WMNXMSOJXE72IOHV452LQSJ7WM/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
