Python has this elegant destructuring-assignment iterable-unpacking syntax that every serious Pythonista and her dog tends to use whereëver possible. So where a novice might write
split_address = address.split(':')
host = split_address[0]
port = split_address[1]a serious Pythonista (and her dog) would instead say
host, port = address.split(':')which is clearly superior on grounds of succinctness and beauty; we don't want our vision to be cluttered with this ugly sub-zero, sub-one notation when we can just declare a sequence of names.
Consider, however, the somewhat-uncommon case where we have an iterable that, for whatever reason, we happen to know contains only one element, and we want to assign that one element to a variable. Here, I've seen people who ought to know better fall back to indexing:
if len(jobs) == 1:
job = jobs[0]But there's no reason to violate the æsthetic principle of "use a length-n (or smaller) tuple of identifiers on the left side of a destructuring assignment in order to name the elements of a length-n iterable" just because n happens to be one:
if len(jobs) == 1:
job, = jobs