>>15
that might work for small things like points, but seems to fall apart on larger structures.
you have to know what position the thing you want is in the list. for points, knowing that "y" is at index 1 is obvious and you don't have to think about it. but for some other data structure -- say a "user" with an "email" property -- a dict/map/hash/object is a lot nicer because you can just say user.email and not be concerned with the order of things inside your data!