Shortcut to initialize variables

[Andrew]

Oops, I probably should have tried searching the list first. My
background is strictly academic. I was switching languages so often I
never got really familiar with any of them. Maybe C for a while, but
I've forgotten alot. I'm hoping python will be the last language I ever
need. :) I don't know why I didn't turn to dictionaries first. It does
seem to be the obvious solution.

I'm writing a program that will take substitution and transposition
cipher texts and spit out plain text with no human input. So I suppose
I'll have dictionaries of digraphs and trigraphs too; for frequency
analysis. Do you think this is to heavy of a project to learn the
language?

Thanks for the quick feedback