Since PEP 3132 gives us:
x = [1,2,3] a, *b = x a 1 b [2, 3]
it seems natural that we should be able to do it the other way too: (doesn't actually work)
a, b = 1, [2,3] x = [a,*b] x [1, 2, 3]
This is essentially itertools.chain, but of course it isn't nearly as much fun:
[n for n in itertools.chain([1],[2,3])] [1, 2, 3]
Now you might be thinking, "yeah, that's cool, but you don't really need it" but this actually came up in practice: I have a function that has a certain behavior for standard types, but when it sees a type it doesn't recognize, it calls a protocol function (like __iter__ or __next__) and expects to receive an iterable whose 0th element is a string. Now I'm probably not going to use itertools.chain because the only members of itertools I can reliably remember are count() and izip(), so my next alternative (which is perfectly acceptable) is
a, b = 1, [2,3] x = [a] + b
This isn't too bad, but it is slightly less clear than x = [a,*b] and much less efficient when b is long. It seems so simple...makes me think it came up before and I missed it. David