Pythonification of the asterisk-based collection packing/unpacking syntax

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 24 Dec 2011 06:54:07 -0800, Eelco wrote:

> Context dependence is not something to be avoided at all costs, but all
> else being equal, less is certainly more. The general concept of
> grouping thing together which parenthesis is an extremely pervasive one
> in programming, and thus deserves its own set of context-dependent
> rules. Packing and unpacking collections is far, far more rare, 

Not in Python, where it is a very common idiom.


> and thus
> a form that requires you to write more but remember less is certainly
> relatively favorable.

Not in Python, where iteration is a fundamental idiom and packing/
unpacking is a basic syntax construct precisely because the designer of 
the language expects it to be common and encourages its use. There are 
built-in functions designed to be used with unpacking operations, e.g. 
enumerate and zip:

for i, obj in enumerate(sequence): ...
for a, b in zip(obj, range(100)): ...


-- 
Steven