Tuple unpacking order changes values assigned

Solution 1:

Prerequisites - 2 important Points

• Lists are mutable

  The main part in lists is that lists are mutable. It means that the values of lists can be changed. This is one of the reason why you are facing the trouble. Refer the docs for more info

• Order of Evaluation

  The other part is that while unpacking a tuple, the evaluation starts from left to right. Refer the docs for more info

Introduction

when you do a,b = c,d the values of c and d are first stored. Then starting from the left hand side, the value of a is first changed to c and then the value of b is changed to d.

The catch here is that if there are any side effects to the location of b while changing the value of a, then d is assigned to the later b, which is the b affected by the side effect of a.

Use Case

Now coming to your problem

In the first case,

nums = [1, 2, 0]    
nums[nums[0]], nums[0] = nums[0], nums[nums[0]]    

nums[0] is initially 1 and nums[nums[0]] is 2 because it evaluates to nums[1]. Hence 1,2 is now stored into memory.

Now tuple unpacking happens from left hand side, so

nums[nums[0]] = nums[1] = 1   # NO side Effect. 
nums[0] = 2

hence print nums will print [2, 1, 0]

However in this case

nums = [1, 2, 0]   
nums[0], nums[nums[0]] = nums[nums[0]], nums[0]    

nums[nums[0]], nums[0] puts 2,1 on the stack just like the first case.

However on the left hand side, that is nums[0], nums[nums[0]], the changing of nums[0] has a side effect as it is used as the index in nums[nums[0]]. Thus

nums[0] = 2
nums[nums[0]] = nums[2] = 1  # NOTE THAT nums[0] HAS CHANGED

nums[1] remains unchanged at value 2. hence print nums will print [2, 2, 1]

Solution 2:

You can define a class to track the process:

class MyList(list):
    def __getitem__(self, key):
        print('get ' + str(key))
        return super(MyList, self).__getitem__(key)
    def __setitem__(self, key, value):
        print('set ' + str(key) + ', ' + str(value))
        return super(MyList, self).__setitem__(key, value)

For the first method:

nums = MyList([1, 2, 0])
nums[nums[0]], nums[0] = nums[0], nums[nums[0]]

the output is:

get 0
get 0
get 1
get 0
set 1, 1
set 0, 2

While the second method:

nums = MyList([1, 2, 0])
nums[0], nums[nums[0]] = nums[nums[0]], nums[0]

the output is:

get 0
get 1
get 0
set 0, 2
get 0
set 2, 1

In both methods, the first three lines are related to tuple generation while the last three lines are related to assignments. Right hand side tuple of the first method is (1, 2) and the second method is (2, 1).

In the assignment stage, first method get nums[0] which is 1, and set nums[1] = 1, then nums[0] = 2, second method assign nums[0] = 2, then get nums[0] which is 2, and finally set nums[2] = 1.