Remove comment recommending tuples in settings docs

[Daniel Pope <dan@…>]

In the documentation for ​Creating your own settings there's a recommendation which reads "For settings that are sequences, use tuples instead of lists. This is purely for performance."

This is bunk. Profiling shows that tuples run no faster than lists for most operations (certainly looping, which we are likely to do most often). On the other hand, list-literal syntax has the advantage that it doesn't collapse to a single value when you have a single item and omit the trailing comma, like tuple syntax. Using list syntax is no slower, more legible and less error prone. An often-expressed view in the wider Python community seems that tuples should not be considered as immutable lists. They are intended as fixed-length records - indeed the mathematical concept of a tuple is quite distinct from that of a sequence.

I suggest this (factually inaccurate) comment be removed, and in fact we should look at migrating all of the settings documentation to lists for legibility.

[dc]

It looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck... For all practical uses tuples behave like immutable lists.

And django settings are immutable too (sort of). And tuples are faster than lists.

So i don't think that this change will improve documentation.

[Daniel Pope <dan@…>]

tuples behave like immutable lists, but tuple-literal syntax is worse for describing lists (understandable if the intention was not for them to be used as lists).

tuples are negligibly faster than lists:

mauve-desktop:~/dev/Django-1.0$ python -m timeit -s "a = range(1000)" "for i in a: pass"
10000 loops, best of 3: 50.4 usec per loop
mauve-desktop:~/dev/Django-1.0$ python -m timeit -s "a = tuple(range(1000))" "for i in a: pass"
10000 loops, best of 3: 49.3 usec per loop

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

We're certainly not about to move from tuples to lists there because it would break existing code that already expects things to be tuples. I'll remove the performance note, however, since it's not worth scaring people.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

(In [9146]) Changed the "write your own settings" recommendation to mention that Django
uses tuples, but not making it a recommendation. That might head off the endless
tuples vs. lists debates.

Fixed #8846.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

(In [9147]) [1.0.X] Changed the "write your own settings" recommendation to mention that Django
uses tuples, but not making it a recommendation. That might head off the endless
tuples vs. lists debates.

Fixed #8846.

Backport of r9146 from trunk.