Hello,

On the comaprison site with python you wrote:

Java:
int[] a = {5, 10, 11};
a[0] = 12;  // Reassign

Python:
a = (5, 10, 11)
a[0] = 12  # Reassign

This is wrong. x = () means a tuple in python and tuples are not changable after they are inizialized.

Let's see what happens when we try as described above:

Python 2.3.5 (#2, Mar 26 2005, 17:32:32)
[GCC 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-12)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
loading  .pystartup
>>> a = (1, 2, 3)
>>> a[1]
2
>>> a[0]
1
>>> a[1] = 12
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: object doesn't support item assignment
>>> a.__class__
<type 'tuple'>

Python does not support arrays by default. It only supports tuples, lists, and dictionaries. However there is the Numeric package for python which supports arrays .

in the context of the comparison and main use scenarios of how arrays are used in processing/java, maybe it's safe to compare them to python lists (at least in this context). they share same functionality to array of other dynamically typed languages like actionscript/javascript or lingo:

Code:

a=[5,10,11] # create a list, not a tuple
a[0]=12 # reassign an index
a.append(23) # grow list
a.pop() # remove the last element 

maybe it's also worth noting python lists are closer to Java's Vector or ArrayList classes. unlike the "primitive" array types they can contain mixed types of data and have no fixed length...

OK. It's updated now. Please have a look. I tried to balance accuracy and brevity. Thanks to both jc-denton and toxi for the precision.

http://processing.org/reference/compare/python.html