No swap function in Python?

[Skip Montanaro]

    >> Finally, if the behaviour is guaranteed, is this an efficient way of
    >> doing a swap?

    Thomas> Yes. 

Relatively speaking, yes it is efficient.  Still, you do wind up creating
and deleting a tuple as a result, which while not terribly expensive is not
without cost.  "(a,b) = (b,a)" compiles to (approximately):

    LOAD_FAST		b
    LOAD_FAST		a
    BUILD_TUPLE		2
    UNPACK_TUPLE	2
    STORE_FAST		a
    STORE_FAST		b

It's easy to see how you can use the runtime stack without going through the
BUILD/UNPACK pair:

    LOAD_FAST		b
    LOAD_FAST		a
    STORE_FAST		b
    STORE_FAST		a

Any peephole optimizer can do this for you... ;-)

Skip