Consider this assignment statement example:
>>> x, y = x[y] = {}, None
>>> x
{None: ({...}, None)}
>>> y
>>>
What is the value assigned to x and how does this assignment work?
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1 Answer
The statement assigns the value on the far right to each target to its left, starting at the left. Thus, it's equivalent to
t = {}, None
x, y = t
x[y] = t
So, t starts out as a tuple consisting of an empty dict and the value None.
Next, we unpack t and assign each part to x and y: x is bound to the empty dict, and y is bound to None.
Finally, we can assign the tuple to x[y] as well, since we just defined x and y. The key None is added to the dict referenced by x, and its value is the original tuple. Thus, we've made x[y] refer to x itself: a cycle!
Python can detect this cycle, so it shows the dict as {...}, rather than trying to expand it infinitely to {None: ({None: ({None: ....
