Yes, now it is clear! As always, I should have RTFM, the operator* is not just a syntactic sugar and thus does not make copies. You know, my actual scenario was with four variables at the time:
a, b, c, d = [], [], [], [] so I was even more tempted to use the previous and wrong approach:-) Thank you for your explanation. No more errors in my code from now on (oh well,...) jbar -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
