bud wrote: > I'll have to check up on the *L - is that a reference?
No, as Chris already answered, unary * is used for packing and unpacking positional arguments to functions; unary ** is similarly used for collecting keyword arguments. > I know in Perl, you can assign the lhs to a list, > below works because there are exactly 2 items on the rhs. > Does Python have a catchall, or an ignore the rest? Yes. In Python 3, you can do this: >>> a, b, *t, c = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) >>> t [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] (but not in Python 2) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list