Why is there no tuple comprehension in Python?

Question

As we all know, there's list comprehension, like

[i for i in [1, 2, 3, 4]]

and there is dictionary comprehension, like

{i:j for i, j in {1: 'a', 2: 'b'}.items()}

but

(i for i in (1, 2, 3))

will end up in a generator, not a tuple comprehension. Why is that?

My guess is that a tuple is immutable, but this does not seem to be the answer.

Answer 1

As another poster macm mentioned , the fastest way to create a tuple from a generator is tuple([generator]).

---

Performance Comparison

• List comprehension:

  $ python3 -m timeit "a = [i for i in range(1000)]"
  10000 loops, best of 3: 27.4 usec per loop
  

• Tuple from list comprehension:

  $ python3 -m timeit "a = tuple([i for i in range(1000)])"
  10000 loops, best of 3: 30.2 usec per loop
  

• Tuple from generator:

  $ python3 -m timeit "a = tuple(i for i in range(1000))"
  10000 loops, best of 3: 50.4 usec per loop
  

• Tuple from unpacking:

  $ python3 -m timeit "a = *(i for i in range(1000)),"
  10000 loops, best of 3: 52.7 usec per loop
  

My version of python:

$ python3 --version
Python 3.6.3

---

So you should always create a tuple from a list comprehension unless performance is not an issue.

Answer 2

You can use a generator expression:

tuple(i for i in (1, 2, 3))

but parentheses were already taken for.. generator expressions.

Answer 3

I believe it's simply for the sake of clarity, we do not want to clutter the language with too many different symbols. Also a tuple comprehension is never necessary, a list can just be used instead with negligible speed differences, unlike a dict comprehension as opposed to a list comprehension.

Answer 4

Tuples cannot efficiently be appended like a list.

So a tuple comprehension would need to use a list internally and then convert to a tuple.

That would be the same as what you do now : tuple( [ comprehension ] )