Lucas Wiman writes:
That said, the * syntax feels intuitive in a way that / doesn’t.
I disagree. In C-like languages, it says "dereference a pointer" (ie, use the content at the pointer). In Python, it's used for destructuring iterables, ie, use the content at the iteration pointer by packing or unpacking. By contrast, "/" doesn't have a unary meaning in any language I know of (well, Lisp, but in Lisp it's just a symbol that happens to have a built-in function definition).
I’d suggest: x, *… = foo This seems unambiguous and fairly self-explanatory.
I advocated just "..." myself, so obviously I'm biased, but I don't see what prepending "*" says that "..." by itself doesn't. Steven d'Aprano wrote:
I like "/" because it reminds me of the slash in "No Smoking" signs, and similar. As in "No (more) iteration".
And in Python its only non-binary use is to say "no more positional- only parameters." I like "..." better for its suggestion that there's more to come ;-) but objectively I guess "/" is just as good. :-)