Thread by @__mharrison__

I'm teaching a Fundamentals of Python class this week.

We talked about tuples, and there was some confusion as to their existence.

Certainly, you could live in a world without them, but...

🧵

First of all ... pronunciation.

You can say "two-pull" or "tuh-pull" (both are valid).

A big confusion is when to use a list or tuple?

My basic rule of thumb:

If you have items of the same type and care about the order or re-arranging it, you want a list.

If you have a sequence of items with different types (then you wouldn't be re-arranging it), and the order is important, then tuple.

Tuples can be used for:

🐍 Record-type data
🐍 Returning multiple items from a function
🐍 *Unpacking* in assignment or for loops
🐍 Hashing sequences
🐍 Slots

Some examples from the standard library:

You can create them with a literal or the constructor. (There is also the unpack operator, but I find this hard to grok).

One annoying thing with pulling things out of tuples, is that you often introduce "magic numbers". If that is a problem, consider a named tuple (there are 2 ways to create them):

Thanks for reading 🙏

When do you use tuples?

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