Comments on: What the Heck Is a Tuple, Anyway? http://joeygibson.com/2010/01/13/what-the-heck-is-a-tuple-anyway/ Java, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Ruby, Python, Lisp, Objective-C, OSX, politics, religion, Koine Greek, Tae Kwon Do, Spanish and much more! Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:22:41 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: Clint http://joeygibson.com/2010/01/13/what-the-heck-is-a-tuple-anyway/comment-page-1/#comment-1600 Clint Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:39:04 +0000 http://joeygibson.com/?p=1500#comment-1600 "Too-ple" “Too-ple”

]]> By: Chris DeLashmutt http://joeygibson.com/2010/01/13/what-the-heck-is-a-tuple-anyway/comment-page-1/#comment-1593 Chris DeLashmutt Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:10:51 +0000 http://joeygibson.com/?p=1500#comment-1593 Nice example! The distinction between Tuples and other data structures in Scala makes more sense to me now. It almost seems to me like an anonymous, immutable struct. Based on your descriptions, I think I would prefer a Tuple in the case where I wanted to return an small, immutable set of values of different types to a caller. It is concise, clear, type-safe, and it seems very easy to re-factor to a proper class if you need to add functionality. It also seems like it can be easily abused by putting way too many values in it, or by passing that Tuple around to multiple classes. I would say that if you need more than 2-3 values, or you pass the Tuple to more that 2-3 different objects, then you need to use a class. It's _too_ easy to create value classes in Scala not to. Nice example! The distinction between Tuples and other data structures in Scala makes more sense to me now. It almost seems to me like an anonymous, immutable struct.

Based on your descriptions, I think I would prefer a Tuple in the case where I wanted to return an small, immutable set of values of different types to a caller. It is concise, clear, type-safe, and it seems very easy to re-factor to a proper class if you need to add functionality.

It also seems like it can be easily abused by putting way too many values in it, or by passing that Tuple around to multiple classes. I would say that if you need more than 2-3 values, or you pass the Tuple to more that 2-3 different objects, then you need to use a class. It’s _too_ easy to create value classes in Scala not to.

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