[Python-Dev] Half-baked proposal: * (and **?) in assignments (original) (raw)

Nathan Clegg nathan-nntp@geerbox.com
Sat, 23 Nov 2002 09:52:40 -0800

Brian Quinlan wrote:

year, month, day = time.localtime()[0:3]

or year, month, day, *dummy = time.localtime()

I think Gareth's split example is better. localtime returns a fixed-length tuple. Things are much more interesting when you don't know how many elements you're getting. Which do you like better for, say, parsing required and optional parameters to a command:

(cmd, req1, req2, req3, opt_str) = input.split(None, 4) opts = opt_str.split() execute_cmd(cmd, req1, req2, req3, opts)

or

parts = input.split() (cmd, req1, req2, req3) = parts[:4] opts = parts[4:] execute_cmd(cmd, req1, req2, req3, opts)

or

(cmd, req1, req2, req3, *opts) = input.split() execute_cmd(cmd, req1, req2, req3, opts)

A really interesting possibility is:

(first, *middle, last) = input.split()

This breaks the parallel to parameter passing, but would be very handy.

Are we getting too perlish?

-- Nathan Clegg GeerBox nathan-nntp@geerbox.com