You are right, but sometimes, I don't see how you can easily achieve the same task without using the asterisk. For instance, if you want to plot a list of (x,y)

You are right, but sometimes, I don't see how you can easily achieve the same task without using the asterisk. For instance, if you want to plot a list of (x,y) coordinates which is likely to happen quite often, you can do : plot(*zip(*L)) What do you usually do? (Probably creating two intermediary lists with a loop?)