In porting one of the old peephole optimizations to the new AST compiler I noticed something weird going on with the following code: a, b, c = 1, 2, 3 Now, as you would expect this gets parsed into an Assign node. That Assign node looks like the following: Assign.targets = [Tuple(Name(a), Name(b), Name(c))] Assign.value = Tuple(1, 2, 3) What's weird here is that Assign.targets is an asdl_seq ... why are we wrapping the names in a Tuple() node? Shouldn't it look something more like this: Assign.targets = [Name(a), Name(b), Name(c)] I understand that parsing the testlist might yield a tuple and it was thus easier to just use the tuple rather than unpack it into an asdl_seq ... but if this was the intention, then why is Assign.targets an expr* rather than a plain old expr? Cheers, Tom