Is there an easier way to express this list slicing?

[John Henry]

If I have a list of say, 10 elements and I need to slice it into
irregular size list, I would have to create a bunch of temporary
variables and then regroup them afterwords, like:

# Just for illustration. Alist can be any existing 10 element list
a_list=("",)*10
(a,b,c1,c2,c3,d1,d2,d3,d4,d5)=a_list
alist=(a,)
blist=(b,)
clist=(c1,c2,c3)
dlist=(d2,d3,d4,d5)

That obviously work but do I *really* have to do that?

BTW: I know you can do:
alist=a_list[0]
blist=a_list[1]
clist=a_list[2:5]
dlist=a_list[5:]

but I don't see that it's any better.

Can I say something to the effect of:

(a,b,c[0:2],d[0:5])=a_list    # Obviously this won't work

??

I am asking this because I have a section of code that contains *lots*
of things like this.  It makes the code very unreadable.

Thanks,