[Greg Ewing]

Writing code that depends on long sequences having things in particular positions is an anti-pattern,

Seems like you're against positional parameters in general. What makes argument unpacking in a function definition different that other positional parameter use cases. Until csv and sql start returning records with field name attributes instead of tuples, we'll need something like we have now. Also attribute access has performance issues compared to tuple unpacking (sad fact of life). Raymond