[Python-Dev] Py2.6 ideas (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Sat Feb 17 00:33:23 CET 2007

"Raymond Hettinger" <python at rcn.com> wrote:

> Raymond Hettinger schrieb: >> d, g, v, t, r = model(somecontract)

[MvL] > I find that line quite unreadable Of course, I can't give you the fully spelled-out line from proprietary code. But at this point we're just talking about the use cases for tuples with or without named attributes. Some functions return multiple values and some calls to those functions do tuple unpacking. That is ubiquitous throughout Python. If the tuple also happens to be a NamedTuple, you get tooltips for it (reminding you which fields are which) and any error messages will show the full repr with both the names and values. If not unpacked, then the attribute access is helpful. Something like contract.vega or testresult.failures or somesuch.

For what it's worth, I've actually been using a similar approach with lists and global names of list indices because I needed a mutable structure, the list instance was significantly smaller than an object with slots (by a factor of 3), and because using global constants was actually competitive with a slots name lookup.

After having seen your tuple recipe, I've been planning on converting it to a list-based recipe for the same benefits (except for unpacking) in my own code.

Then again, I'm also looking forward to adding the tuple-based recipe to my own library for all of the reasons you outlined.

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