[mmcnickle]

Attribute access of namedtuples aren't any quicker as you've surmised, it requires a hash lookup and an index lookup. Index lookup is as quick as normal tuple index lookups. The main reasons I reach for namedtuples is memory efficiency and much quicker creation times vs objects.

[andreasvc]

Memory efficiency? The last time I checked namedtuple dynamically generates code for a class with the specified fields, and evals the code. So it would be exactly as efficient as a normal class. For memory efficiency you want to have multiple points in a single array, to avoid the overhead of objects, but you'd need Numpy or Cython for that.

[mmcnickle]

Not quite. The namedtuple will not have a per-instance attribute dictionary, so there is a significant memery saving when creating loads of them.

[andreasvc]

Right. But you can fit 2 floats in 8 bytes so if it's memory saving and efficiency you're after, you would use an array to avoid object creation overhead. Namedtuples are nice for their self-documenting properties though, but it's misleading to advertise them as an optimization.

[pdonis]

Attribute access of namedtuples aren't any quicker as you've surmised, it requires a hash lookup and an index lookup.

Yes, you're right, I was mistaken about how namedtuples work under the hood.