Lists and Tuples

This chapter introduces a new concept: data structures. A data structure is a collection of data elements (such as numbers or characters, or even other data structures) that is structured in some way, such as by numbering the elements. The most basic data structure in Python is the sequence. Each element of a sequence is assigned a number—its position, or index. The first index is zero, the second index is one, and so forth. Some programming languages number their sequence elements starting with one, but the zero-indexing convention has a natural interpretation of an offset from the beginning of the sequence, with negative indexes wrapping around to the end. If you find the numbering a bit odd, I can assure you that you’ll most likely get used to it pretty fast.