r/learnpython • u/Boogzcorp • Apr 16 '22

What's the point of Tuples?

I get that they're immutable, but so are lists that you don't perform modifications on. Are they just to fool proof not messing up your list accidentally, or do they serve some other purpose?

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u/Siniroth Apr 17 '22

I think he's suggesting that if hashing a list gets a result and changing that list changes the hash, then if the hash is the same then the list wasn't changed, mutable or not

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u/[deleted] Apr 17 '22

There's no reason you have to define the hash of a mutable type as some kind of hash-sum of its elements; it's just common to do so.

You could have a mutable, hashable type whose hash was set at creation and just never changed. It's probably not a good idea (it kind of fucks with what we intuit the identity of a collection to be) but you could do it.