Because few languages have the ability to create a tuple with syntactic sugar on the fly that Python has. In PHP, you can similarly do the following: > list($a

Because few languages have the ability to create a tuple with syntactic sugar on the fly that Python has. In PHP, you can similarly do the following: > list($a, $b) = [$b, $a]; Which is a bit more verbose than what Python does, but it's the same thing under the hood - you create a list/tuple, create a new list with swapped items at specific indices and then dissolve that list back to local variables. In the end, this is more expensive than the swap you'd do in C++^W other languages (EDIT: apparently C++ can also do this now), since it involves tuple creation. Although the compiler/JIT/interpreter will most likely recognize this pattern and optimize it to a `swap` call.