I'm not sure where I ran across this, but until recently I wasn't awarethat you could pre-explode lists and tuples when you declared whatparameters a function takes. That sounds stilted, so I'll give anexample:

def foo(a, (b, c, d)):  print a, b, c, d

This is slightly more compact than the equivalent:

def bar(a, tmp):  b, c, d = tmp  print a, b,

Here's how Hotmail stacks up this week:

• 4 messages accepted; unfortunately, one of them was definitely spamand at least two more probably were.
• 21 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail emailaddresses.
• 49 messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 4 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hitour spamtraps.
• 6 messages refused due to their origin IP address, all for beingin the SBL ; four from SBL17935 ,one from SBL27471 ,

In my recent 'give me RSS feeds' entry I wrote in passing '[...] these daysemail is just too much of a hassle'. Which it is. Let me illustrate how.

To subscribe to new mailing lists these days I need to:

1. figure out how to subscribe
2. make up a new email address to give the list
3. go through a multi-stage subscription dance
4. make sure our antispam filters won't eat the list messages
5. adjust my filters to put the messages somewhere distinct
6. remember to check

One of the neat things about programming in Python is finding out aboutclever little idioms that are obvious in retrospect. My latest find isa little trick for handling mutable function arguments.

As I mentioned back when discussing the consequences of def beingan executable statement , the way I'd beenhandling mutable default arguments was something like:

def foo(a, blst = None):  if blst is None:    blst = []

At two lines, this is just verbose enough to grate lightly butirritatingly on my nerves