Newbie coding question - format error

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.11326.1404051003.18130.python-list at python.org>,
 Sibylle Koczian <nulla.epistola at web.de> wrote:

> Am 29.06.2014 09:06, schrieb Martin S:

> > IndexError: tuple index out of range
> >
> 
> {0} ... {3} are just placeholders in your format strings, they can't 
> exist outside of them. And you can't put more placeholders into the 
> format string than you've got values to put into them. That's what the 
> IndexError is about.

This seems like a confusing error message to me.  I've opened 
http://bugs.python.org/issue21879 on this.