Question

I was just reading a presentation on python and I noted that the author had missed out the round brackets of the tuple for the items to iterate over, and it struck me that I might be inclined to leave them in. A quick re-read of PEP-8 gave no definitive answer, and I didn’t want to ‘fall-back’ on the old “explicit is better than implicit” without some discussion; so …

Which do you prefer? Which do you think is more pythonic in these two equivalent for statements (limit the discussion to its use in for statements).

>>> # Some setup
>>> x, y, z = 1, 'Hi', True
>>> 
>>> #Style 1: Implicit tuple
>>> for i in x, y, z:
    print(i)


1
Hi
True
>>> # Style 2: Explicit tuple
>>> for i in (x, y, z):
    print(i)


1
Hi
True
>>> 

Answer 1

I’d go with Style 2, as you can actually understand what you are iterating over:

>>> # Style 2: Explicit tuple
>>> for i in (x, y, z):
        print(i)

Style 1 seems a bit confusing to me for some reason.