addressable is a silly little utility that allows you to access items inside of a list using one or more indices as keys. You pretty much get to pretend pretend that a list is a souped-up dictionary.

artists = [{
    'id': '0488', 
    'name': 'Lambchop', 
    'members': ['Kurt Wagner'], 
}, {
    'id': '9924', 
    'name': 'Dire Straits', 
    'members': ['Mark Knopfler'], 
}]

# keys are matched against one or more indices
artists = List(artists, indices=('id', 'name'))
print artists['0488'] == artists['Lambchop']

# fuzzy matching
artists = List(artists, indices=('id', 'title'), fuzzy=True)
print artists['strait']

# extract the value, not the metadata
artists = List(artists, indices=('id', 'title'), facet='title')
print artists['9924'] == 'Dire Straits'

So why would you want to do any of this? You probably don't.

addressable can be useful for certain DSL or library code where you want to give the end users some freedom to code things their way, when you need to be able to very easily refer to certain things that are weirdly named or when there's multiple common ways of referring to something and you want the flexibility to mix-and-match.