In article <16272.22369.546606.870697@montanaro.dyndns.org>, Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com> wrote:
Parens are required in certain situations within list comprehensions around tuples (probably for syntactic reasons, but perhaps to aid the reader as well) where tuples can often be defined without enclosing parens. Here's a contrived example:
>>> [(a,b) for (a,b) in zip(range(5), range(10))] [(0, 0), (1, 1), (2, 2), (3, 3), (4, 4)] >>> [a,b for (a,b) in zip(range(5), range(10))] File "<stdin>", line 1 [a,b for (a,b) in zip(range(5), range(10))] ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax
This one has bitten me several times. When it does, I discover the error quickly due to the syntax error, but it would be bad if this became valid syntax and returned a list [a,X] where X is an iterator. I don't think you could count on this getting caught by a being unbound, because often the variables in list comprehensions can be single letters that shadow previous bindings. -- David Eppstein http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science