Tuples

• As every sequence type, it is ordered and subscriptable with integer indexes.
• Immutable, represented just as values separated with commas, or separated with commas and enclosed with parentheses:

fruits = "banana", "apple", "orange"

or

fruits = ("banana", "apple", "orange")

Why immutables?

Why use tuples since they can’t change?

• They uses less memory and demands less processing.
• They don’t need to be copied when attributing to a new variable (see later).

What if I really want to change?

fruits[1] = "pineapple" # try changing "apple" to "pineapple"

TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment

• To “change” a tuple, for example, you would basically need to either:

  1. Create a new tuple (with the changes you want), or
  2. Convert the tuple to a list, change the value you want (lists are mutable), and convert it back to a tuple.
     • Which would mean creating a new list object (from the tuple), and then creating a new tuple object (from the list)… which can be actually very inefficient and costly…