High Performance Python, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3. Lists and Tuples

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Questions You’ll Be Able to Answer After This Chapter

• What are lists and tuples good for?

• What is the complexity of a lookup in a list/tuple?

• How is that complexity achieved?

• What are the differences between lists and tuples?

• How does appending to a list work?

• When should I use lists and tuples?

One of the most important things in writing efficient programs is understanding the guarantees of the data structures you use. In fact, a large part of performant programming is knowing what questions you are trying to ask of your data and picking a data structure that can answer these questions quickly. In this chapter we will talk about the kinds of questions that lists and tuples can answer quickly, and how they do it.

Lists and tuples are a class of data structures called arrays. An array is a flat list of data with some intrinsic ordering. Usually in these sorts of data structures, the relative ...