Question

Is there any other purpose (besides being there because it needs to be) the empty tuple may have? Or: what would you use the empty tuple for? If anything. I just can’t find an answer (well, a positive answer as in: “yes, there is”), please help me out with getting this question out of my head. “for testing if another tuple is empty” is not an acceptable answer since we should use ‘not’ operator for this.

Answer 1

Here’s when.

def tuple_of_primes_less_than( n ):
    if n <= 2: return ()
    else:
        x, p = set( range(2,n) ), 2
        while p <= max(x):
            for k in range(2,int(2+math.sqrt(p))):
                x.discard(k*p)
            p += 1
        return tuple( sorted( x ) )