3 ms·

>>> [a, b] = 2, 3 >>> (a, b) = 2, 3 >>> {a, b} = 2, 3 File "<interactive input>", line 1 SyntaxError: can't assign to literal

• rzimmerman 11y ago
  That could be because sets aren't ordered (even though it looks odd in this context).
  • rectangletangle 11y ago
    I thought that at first too, but even then the exception seems spurious. It would be more inline with existing Python behavior to evaluate it as undefined/indeterminate assignment order (though this would be pretty useless). >>> a, b, c, d = {1, 2, 3, 'a'} >>> a 'a' Regardless, it shouldn't be surprising when writing insane code, that the language starts acting insane. Python as a whole is pretty decent when it comes to handling syntactic edge cases.
    • netmare 11y ago
      The tricky part is that the [a,b] and (a,b) in your original examples are not list/tuple literals, but a target_list according to Python's grammar [0], which can be optionally enclosed in parentheses or brackets. To be honest, I didn't know the latter were allowed, even though I've been using Python for years. IMHO, they should have just allowed parentheses. It's like the parentheses in function calls--not really a tuple, but syntactic grouping. Why have more that one way to do the same thing? [0]: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/simple_stmts.html#assignment-statements https://docs.python.org/3/reference/simple_stmts.html#assign...