Introducing Python, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Tuples and Lists

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The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

H. Allen Smith

In the previous chapters, we started with some of Python’s basic data types: Booleans, integers, floats, and strings. If you think of those as atoms, the data structures in this chapter are like molecules. That is, we combine those basic types in more complex ways. You will use these every day. Much of programming consists of chopping and gluing data into specific forms, and the tuples and lists of this chapter are some of our first examples.

Most computer languages can represent a sequence of items indexed by their integer position: first, second, and so on down to the last. You’ve already seen Python strings (Chapter 4; sequences of text characters) and bytes and bytearrays (Chapter 5; sequences of 8-bit binary values).

Python has more sequence structures: tuples and lists. These contain zero or more elements. ...