While I like all the literal/comprehension/etc.-related proposals, those related to function definitions seem to me to be dubious. I am not convinced by the argument of unification with the assignment LHS syntax. Assignment LHS and function parameter processing are inherently different in Python anyway: * the former does not (and rather, even imaginarily, cannot) include **keywords unpacking and any notion of parameter names, * the latter sets *args as a tuple, not as a list. Making possible to define some positional arguments after *args does not seem to be a big win, and would destroy nice simplicity of the way you specify keyword-only arguments. *** Forbidding keyword arguments before *args in function calls does not seem so bad, but still it is a serious backwards incompatibility... And why would we actually want to forbid it? Regards. *j