Verbose and flexible args and kwargs syntax

[Eelco]

> > I personally quite like them, but I would like them to be more general.
>
> It already is. The *target can be anywhere in the sequence.

Im not sure if this is a genuine understanding, or trollish
obtuseness.

Yes, the target can be anywhere in the sequence. And yes, the
resulting list can contain objects of any type, so its very flexible
in that regard too.

But to relate it to the topic of this thread: no, the syntax does not
allow one to select the type of the resulting sequence. It always
constructs a list.

Yes, we can cast the list to be whatever we want on the next line, but
the question is whether this language design can be improved upon. The
choice of a list feels arbitrary, adding another line to cast it to
something else would be even more verbose, and whats more, there would
be serious performance implications if one should seek to apply this
pattern to a deque/linkedlist; it would make taking off the head/tail
of the list from a constant to a linear operation.

That is:

>>> head, deque(tail) = somedeque

Is better in every way I can think of (readability, consistence,
performance) than:

>>> head, *tail = somedeque
>>> tail = deque(tail)