After your example, `Point` is a class. You are not creating a record, you’re creating the class that defines the schema of fields in any record. A class can be

After your example, `Point` is a class. You are not creating a record, you’re creating the class that defines the schema of fields in any record. A class can be defined without using the `class foo:` syntax, and in this case the class is returned by the function `namedtuple` to produce an equivalent effect. As for the unusual space-delimited syntax, the missing context here is that namedtuple is a very, very old part of Python that predates the conventions now considered good style. Using space delimiters for lists of strings is a common idiom in Perl scripting due to the `qw()` quote syntax. Note the archetypical context where namedtuple was imagined to apply (record-oriented processing of logs and SQL result sets) was commonly handled using Perl before Python became dominant. Namedtuple is definitely the most prominent example of this syntax convention in Python, but other libraries use it too. `enum.Enum` supports a function-like interface directly modeled off namedtuple. It’s a mildly bad idea to keep using it IMHO because it complicates static analysis or refactoring. If someone does a wide search-and-replace of a field name literal it’s easy to miss this edge case.