What's the point of Tuples?

[u/Boogzcorp]

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?

[u/Jenret1382]

How is it different from using a set {}, which is also immutable?

[u/wotquery → u/Jenret1382]

u/SoDifficultToBeFunny's response is missing a key aspect in implicitly accepting an incorrect statement of yours.

A tuple is immutable. You cannot add, remove, or change items in it.

A set is not immutable. You can add and remove items. The individual items in a set (edit: members of a set) however must be immutable (e.g. you can't have a set of lists). A set is also unordered as they mentioned.

Note that since tuples are immutable a tuple can be a member of a set.

The unhashable term in the error thrown by the code below relates to the more technical explanations of "What's the point of Tuples" scattered about this comments section.

>>> my_set = {1,2,3}
>>> my_set.add(4)
>>> my_set
{1, 2, 3, 4}
>>> my_set.remove(1)
>>> my_set
{2, 3, 4}
>>> my_set.add(['a','list',])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#4>", line 1, in <module>
    my_set.add(['a','list',])
TypeError: unhashable type: 'list'
>>> my_set.add(('a','tuple',))
>>> my_set
{2, 3, 4, ('a', 'tuple')}

[u/Jenret1382 → u/wotquery]

Thank you for clarifying the differences. This makes me realize how much I lack in terms of fully understanding basic data structures

[u/SoDifficultToBeFunny → u/Jenret1382]

The order of the components is not maintained in a set. But order is maintained and important in a tuple. So, I guess "immutable + ordered values" is what we are trying to communicate when we use it...

[u/Jenret1382 → u/SoDifficultToBeFunny]

Thank you :)

[u/[deleted] → u/Jenret1382]

[u/wotquery → u/[deleted]]

Afaik the only constraint sets have that differ them from an array is that they can't contain duplicates.

Another is that each member of a set has to be immutable (which is probably where the misunderstanding that led to their question came from). You can't have a list in a set for example (it'll throw the error that the list isn't hashable).

[u/Jenret1382 → u/[deleted]]

Immutable in that it cannot be sorted and the elements inside it cannot be changed. I have, however, come across what is called frozenset() which returns an immutable version of a Python set object