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Comment by bartl | Hacker News Reader

Well I don't think that in

    b = list(a)

it's clear in any way that the purpose of "list" is to make a copy.

No, but it's clear that it returns a list out of "a".

My guess upon seeing list(a) for the first time would have been that it returns [a], which is worse than not knowing what it does.

Possibly this is because I've known lisp longer than python.

I agree. I write Python all the time, and I would have expected something like list(*a).