Trying to understand tuples and lists

Hi, I have a list of tuples ( characters and numbers ) . say, [('a', 1), ('b', 2)] I want to extract 'a' and 1 separately . (x,y) <- head [('a', 1), ('b', 2)] This doesnt work but my idea is to get x contain the value 'a' and y contain the value 1 as the first tuple in the list. Which is the right way of doing this. Thanks for your help. Cheers Karthik. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree