That wasn't my point. My point was that [:] conserves the type of sequence. Also [:] returns a reference to the existing tuple instead of a copy: >>> a =

That wasn't my point. My point was that [:] conserves the type of sequence. Also [:] returns a reference to the existing tuple instead of a copy: >>> a = (1, 2, 3) >>> id(a) 3081276268L >>> id(a[:]) 3081276268L