Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:
On Sunday 09 October 2005 22:44, Greg Ewing wrote:
I'm aware of the differences, but I still see a strong similarity where this particular feature is concerned. The pattern of thinking is the same: "I want to deal with the first n of these things individually, and the rest collectively."
Well stated. I'm in complete agreement on this matter.
It also works for situations where "the first n items are mandatory, the rest are optional". This usage was brought up in the context of a basic line interpreter: cmd, *args = input.split() Another usage is to have a Python function which doesn't support keywords for its positional arguments (to avoid namespace clashes in the keyword dict), but can still unpack the mandatory arguments easily: def func(*args, **kwds): arg1, arg2, *rest = args # Unpack the positional arguments Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- http://boredomandlaziness.blogspot.com