Hi As far as I can tell from the archive, this has not been discussed before. This is the second time in less than a week that I have stumbled over the rather clumsy syntax of extracting some elements of a sequence and at the same time remove those from the sequence:

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L = 'a b 1 2 3'.split(' ') a,b,L = L[0], L[1], L[2:]

I think it would be nice if the following was legal:

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a,b,*L = 'a b 1 2 3'.split(' ') a, b, L ('a', 'b', ['1', '2', '3'])

Today, if the number of variables on both sides of the equal sign doesn't match, an exception is raised (for google reference): ValueError: unpack list of wrong size This new syntax is very similar to the special parameter in function definitions that catches all excess arguments, as in def func(p, --> *args <--, **kw):, and so the semantics should be what everyone expects. Then, if we leave this limiting analogy with the *args parameter and allow the catch-the-rest variable to be anywhere in the left-hand side, we arrive at a splice syntax that reminds me a little of how prolog deals with lists:

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a,*b,c = 'a b 1 2 3'.split(' ') *a,b,c = b.split(' ') a,b,c (['b'], '1', '2')

I believe this would make a nice addition to the language. (Please cc me in response as I'm not subscribed to py-dev.) ...johahn