[Twisted-Python] What rough protocol, its hour come at last, slouches towards Austin to be born?

Glyph Lefkowitz glyph at twistedmatrix.com
Mon Apr 8 19:17:48 EDT 2002


On Mon, 2002-04-08 at 17:53, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> 
> On Monday, April 8, 2002, at 06:08 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:

> > 1: use of the word "tuple".

> I'd say that tuple is pretty standard terminology.  It's used quite 
> heavily in PostgreSQL's source code for example, and I've heard mention 
> of it in reference to common lisp.. Other things probably use it, I 
> don't think it had anything to do with python, I think python's use of 
> it is just the most prolific.

dictionaries define "tuple" as:

    "In functional languages, a data object containing two or more
    components. Also known as a product type or pair, triple, quad, etc.
    Tuples of different sizes have different types, in contrast to lists
    where the type is independent of the length. The components of a
    tuple may be of different types whereas all elements of a list have
    the same type."

This is not quite what Python means.  PostgreSQL defines tuple as:

    "an individual state of a row; each UPDATE of a row creates a new
    tuple for the same logical row".

In Python, it means simply "a list which is immutable".  I think that
these three definitions are sufficiently incompatible that one should
not use the word in a vocabulary for a protocol which is supposed to be
cross-langauge.

-- 
 |    <`'>    |  Glyph Lefkowitz: Travelling Sorcerer  |
 |   < _/ >   |  Lead Developer,  the Twisted project  |
 |  < ___/ >  |      http://www.twistedmatrix.com      |
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