What are “named tuples” in Python?

Question

Reading the changes in Python 3.1, I found something... unexpected:

The sys.version_info tuple is now a named tuple:

Answer 1

named tuples allow backward compatibility with code that checks for the version like this

>>> sys.version_info[0:2]
(3, 1)

while allowing future code to be more explicit by using this syntax

>>> sys.version_info.major
3
>>> sys.version_info.minor
1