Programming in Python

Lists are an extension of an earlier, more primitive concept called arrays.

An older programming concept called a record, which is any data structure that combines several distinct values into an integrated whole.

The individual components of a record are generally called fields.

The simplest way to represent a record in Python is to use a built-in data structure called tuple, which is used in both computer science and mathematics to refer to an ordered, immutable collection of elements.

As it happens, Python programmers rarely refer to the elements of a tuple by their index number because the language offers a convenient syntactic form called destructuring assignment for splitting a tuple into its component elements.

Encode the information for each record as an object containing the necessary fields, which are more often called attributes in the context of a Python object.

In Python, having a reference to an object makes it possible to create new attributes within it.