Trying to understand tuples and lists

[Karthik Kumar]

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.

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