I love tuple unpacking but it annoys me endlessly that the *arguments are unpacked into a list, not a tuple. Whereas if you use * in a function signature, you g

I love tuple unpacking but it annoys me endlessly that the *arguments are unpacked into a list, not a tuple. Whereas if you use * in a function signature, you get a tuple, not a list. My code always ends up looking like first, *rest = xs rest = tuple(rest) because often I want to hash "rest". Another trick I often use: the_only, = xs This extracts the single element of a one-element iterable and throws an error if xs is empty or has more than one element.