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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Often it's bad style, but IMHO if you just need to do something like:

    x = 0; y = []; z = None

Then it is actually clearer to group them together, it means more "real code" on screen at a time.

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In this case you could just use:

x, y, z = 0, [], None

I do not know whether that was a good example to show the benefits of the semicolon:

    x, y, z = 0, [], None

While the semicolon is only a convenience it has some common use cases. For example shoot-and-forget invokations of third party modules:

  import sys; sys.exit()
  import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
  import cgitb; cgitb.enable()
  import psyco; psyco.full()
  import pygtk; pygtk.require('2.0')

And of course it's pretty useful in environments where one-liner are easier to handle:

  $ python -c "import mymod; mymod.test()"

Now that I look in my code I actually have:

    import matplotlib; matplotlib.use('Agg'); from matplotlib import pyplot

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