On 15 Feb 2007 16:04:14 -0800, Paul McGuire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Feb 15, 5:21 pm, Paul Rubin <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > How can there be a structure datatype with an unpredictable > > number of members? > > > > It might have come across as a different question-sorry for any > > confusion. > > This may be where the "tuple is like a struct" analogy isn't so good, > and "tuple is like a list but immutable" is better. > > In both of your examples, the caller of f() sent a fixed list of > arguments: (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) in the first case and (8,9,10) in the > second. Internally I bet the compiler wants to clean up that same > list of those same args when f() is finished. > > Just as a thought experiment, do this for yourself. Implement f as: > > def f(*args): > args = list(args) > print args > > Now what is it you want to do with args that you can't do with it as a > tuple? Do you want some form of communication back to the caller to > occur, for example? Maybe some kind of pass-by-ref instead of pass-by- > value? >
I wrote code that did exactly this just yesterday. I needed a list because I wanted to pop arguments off as I consumed them. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list