unary star

[David Eppstein]

If f(a, b, *(c, d)) is always equivalent to f(a, b, c, d), then why 
isn't (a, b, *(c, d)) always equivalent to (a, b, c, d)?

That is, since (non-keyworded) function arguments are a lot like tuples, 
why isn't there a unary star pseudo-operator to expand a sequence into 
the end of a tuple or list expression?

It's not really strictly necessary since any expression (..., *L) could 
be replaced by (...)+list(L) (the list() may be needed since the + 
operation can't handle iterators).  But the idea of expanding a sequence 
in place seems like a powerful one that could be useful in other 
contexts (another one: yield *L).

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science