M.E.Farmer wrote: > I said exactly what I meant, the parentheses around the values creates > a tuple that you have no reference to!
repeating it doesn't make you right; no extra tuple is created, and the parens are part of the syntax: If the target is a target list enclosed in parentheses or in square brackets: The object must be a sequence with the same number of items as there are targets in the target list, and its items are assigned, from left to right, to the corresponding targets. http://docs.python.org/ref/assignment.html (originally, you had to use [] to unpack lists, and () or no parens only worked for tuples. the ability to use an arbitrary sequence was added in 1.5) on the other hand, the function you're calling in this example *does* create a tuple that you have no reference to after the assignment. that doesn't matter, of course, since the tuple is removed by the garbage collector immediately after it has been unpacked. </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list