Thank you, everyone, for resolving my question. At one point, while trying to solve the problem, I typed
>>> y[1,3] Traceback (most recent call last): File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ? TypeError: list indices must be integers The error message gave me no clue as to what I was doing wrong (in my mind, I was just writing out the elements of a range), and I thought perhaps that my inclusion of a comma was the problem. Perhaps a more explicit error message would have helped. Another solution, I suppose, is to use a list comprehension. Store the indices in a list x. For example, let x = [1,5,4]. Then a,b,c = [y[i] for i in x] Thanks Thomas Philips -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
