bbtony

In every introductory python course tuples are presented as just immutable lists. However a "more accurate" way of describing tuples is if you think of them as records with no field names. When you see tuples as records then the fact that are inmutable make sense, since the order and quantity of the items matters (it remains constant). Records usually have field names and here is where namedtuples comes in handy. Also helps to clarify what the tuples wear (see https://youtu.be/wf-BqAjZb8M?t=44m45s), just 2 minutes clip. If you are thinking why don't define a class, I will tell you a couple of reasons:

1) You know before hand that the number of items won't be modified and the order matters since you are handling records. So it is a simple way of accomplishing that constraint.

2) Because they extend tuple they are inmutable too and therefore they don't store attributes per instance __dict__, field names are stored in the class so if you have tons of instances you save a lot of space.

Why creating a class if you just probably need a read-only interaction? But what about if you need some method? Then you can extend your namedtuple class and add the functionality you want. If for example you want to control the values of the fields when you are creating the namedtuple you can create your own namedtuple by overriding __new__. At that point it is worth it to take a look at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/recordclass.