
Dear Developers, Given a subscriptable object s, the intended rule for the notation for getting an item of s seems that, for any expression {e}, such as "x, ", s[{e}] (i.e., s[x, ] if {e} is "x, ") means the same as s[({e})] (i.e., s[(x, )] in the considered case), namely, should be evaluated as s.__getitem__(({e})) (or s.__class_getitem__(({e})) when that applies). If this is the rule, then it looks simple and hence friendly to the user. However, there are at least two exceptions: (1) The case where {e} is the empty expression "": The expression s[] raises SyntaxError instead of being evaluated in the same way as s[()] is. (2) The case where {e} contains "*" for unpacking: An expression containing the unpacking notation, such as s[*iterable, ] raises SyntaxError instead of being evaluated in the same way as s[(*iterable, )] in this example, is. Are these (and other if any) exceptions justified? If not, I propose having the described rule to have full effect if that would simplify the syntax. This would affect currently working codes which rely on SyntaxError raised in either of the described ways (through eval, exec or import??). I wonder if reliance on SyntaxError in these cases should be supported in all future versions of Python. Best regards, Takuo Matsuoka