7.1 Using tuples to collect data

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 go with any of the following techniques, depending on the circumstances:

• Use lambdas (or functions created with the def statement) to select a named item based on the index

• Use lambdas (or def functions) with multiple positional parameters coupled with *args to assign a tuple of items to parameter names

• Use a NamedTuple class 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:

>>&gt...