In Chapter 3, Functions, Iterators, and Generators, we showed two common techniques to work with tuples. We've also hinted at a third way to handle complex structures. We can do any of the following techniques, depending on the circumstances:
- Use lambdas (or functions) to select a named item using the index
- Use lambdas (or functions) with the argument to assign a tuple items to parameter names
- Use named tuples to select an item by attribute name or index
Our trip data, introduced in Chapter 4, Working with Collections, has a rather complex structure. The data started as an ordinary time series of position reports. To compute the distances covered, we transposed the data into a sequence of legs with a start position, end position, and distance as a nested three-tuple.
Each item in the sequence of legs looks as follows as a three-tuple:
first_leg = (
(37.549016, -76.330295),
(37.840832, -76.273834),
17.7246)The first two items are the starting and ending...