Does anyone have an example of using the pathological case a,a,a=1,2,3 or similar in real code (except as a coding error)? I can't think of a use case for using the same variable more then once on the left side of a multiple assignment. -- Mike
I had, although... One may say it was an coding error:Coding an event queue using a binary heap, I wanted to to pick the first one (into node) andmove the last position into first while clearing the last position ( node <- self[1} <- self[last] <- nil) in one statement: node, self[1], self[last], last = self[1], self[last], nil, last-1 The code worked, funny enough, as long as more than one event was in the queue. It did work better after I made four single assignments from it to enforce the execution order:
node = self[1] self[1] = self[last] self[last] = nil last = last-1 -- Oliver