surprising += for lists

[Alec Taylor]

Quick aside, you can insert tuples without much effort: `points += ((3,5),)`

And also that I can't do the reverse, i.e.:
>>> foo = tuple()
>>> foo += [5,6]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: can only concatenate tuple (not "list") to tuple

On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 10:57 PM, Ulrich Eckhardt <doomster at knuut.de> wrote:
> Hi everybody!
>
> I was just smacked by some very surprising Python 2.7 behaviour. I was
> assembling some 2D points into a list:
>
>  points = []
>  points += (3, 5)
>  points += (4, 6)
>
> What I would have expected is to have [(3, 5), (4, 6)], instead I got [3,
> 5, 4, 6]. My interpretations thereof is that the tuple (x, y) is iterable,
> so the elements are appended one after the other. Actually, I should have
> used points.append(), but that's a different issue.
>
> Now, what really struck me was the fact that [] + (3, 5) will give me a
> type error. Here I wonder why the augmented assignment behaves so much
> different.
>
> Can anyone help me understand this?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Uli
>
>
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