> What about del team[2]? > > There is no name involved here, and even a reference to team[2] won't help.
(I'm not sure quite what question is asking. Apologies if my assumption was incorrect.) That is precisely why del is a statement. At byte-compile time, both "team" and "2" are available. The easiest way to see this is to define a simple function: def f(team): del team[2] Now, import the dis module and call dis.dis(f) then check out the byte code assembler statements. Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list