I wrote the other day about two things I think are weird about Python's += operator. In the comments, famed Twisted hacker Jean-Paul Calderone showed me something far, far weirder. This post is a record of me playing around and trying to understand it.

To begin let's review what we know. Tuples are immutable in Python, so you can't increment a member of a tuple:

>>> x = (0,)
>>> x
(0,)
>>> x[0] += 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
>>> x
(0,)

That's fine. But here's the bizarre behavior Jean-Paul showed me: if you put a list in a tuple and use the += operator to extend the list, the increment succeeds and you get a TypeError!:

>>> x = ([],)
>>> x
([],)
>>> x[0] += [1]
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
>>> x
([1],)

The equivalent statement using extend succeeds without the TypeError:

>>> x = ([],)
>>> x[0].extend([1])
>>> x
([1],)

So what's going on with +=? As always, looking at the bytecode is a good step toward understanding. I'll compile and disassemble the statement x[0] += [1], and add some annotations:

>>> import dis
>>> dis.dis(compile('x[0] += [1]', '<string>', 'exec'))
 1 0 LOAD_NAME 0 (x)
 3 LOAD_CONST 0 (0)
 6 DUP_TOPX 2
 -- put x[0] on the stack --
 9 BINARY_SUBSCR 
 10 LOAD_CONST 1 (1)
 13 BUILD_LIST 1
 -- do the "+=" --
 16 INPLACE_ADD
 17 ROT_THREE 
 -- store new value in x[0] --
 18 STORE_SUBSCR
 19 LOAD_CONST 2 (None)
 22 RETURN_VALUE

(See Dan Crosta's Exploring Python Code Objects for more on this technique).

Looks like the statement puts a reference to x[0] on the stack, makes the list [1] and uses it to successfully extend the list in x[0]. But then the statement executes STORE_SUBSCR, which calls the C function PyObject_SetItem, which checks if the object supports item assignment. In our case the object is a tuple, so PyObject_SetItem throws the TypeError. Mystery solved.

Is this a Python bug or just very surprising?