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As a commenter there noted,

[thing] = stuff

works too. I think I like that even better.

Oh, you're very much correct. Let me benchmark that...

There doesn't appear to be any difference in speed between the two. Assigning the result to one variable (totally different to this) is about 6% faster, so this syntax is what I'll use, thank you!

Assigning the result to one variable (totally different to this) is about 6% faster, so this syntax is what I'll use, thank you!

On your exact machine with your exact version of Python, today.

Please don't let microbenchmarks dictate what code you write. If you need a 6% performance gain in a microbenchmark, you've chosen the wrong language to use. Python is about readability and maintainability, not syntax hacks to make some benchmark slightly faster.

The point of the above post was to say "this is nice syntax, and it isn't ten times slower, so it's good on that front too", not to say "use that because it's 6% faster". I'm never going to write this in a tight loop anyway, and even if I did, I'd benchmark the entire piece of code, not just this line.

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