Assignment statements can be plain or augmented. Plain assignment to a variable (e.g., name=value ) is how you create a new variable or rebind an existing variable to a new value. Plain assignment to an object attribute (e.g., x.attr=value ) is a request to object x to create or rebind attribute attr. Plain assignment to an item in a container (e.g., x[k]=value ) is a request to container x to create or rebind the item with index k .

Augmented assignment (e.g., name+=value ) cannot, per se, create new references. Augmented assignment can rebind a variable, ask an object to rebind one of its existing attributes or items, or request the target object to modify itself (an object may, of course, create whatever it wants in response to such requests). When you make a request to an object, it is up to the object to decide whether to honor the request or raise an exception.

Plain assignment

A plain assignment statement in the simplest form has the syntax: 

  target = expression

The target is also known as the lefthand side (LHS), and the expression is the righthand side (RHS). When the assignment executes, Python evaluates the RHS expression, then binds the expressions value to the LHS target. The binding does not depend on the type of the value. In particular, Python draws no strong distinction between callable and noncallable objects, as some other languages do, so you can bind functions, methods, types, and other callables to variables, just as you can numbers, strings, lists, and so on.

Details of the binding do depend on the kind of target, however. The target in an assignment may be an identifier, an attribute reference, an indexing, or a slicing:

An identifier

Is a variable's name. Assignment to an identifier binds the variable with this name.

An attribute reference

Has the syntax obj.name. obj  is an arbitrary expression, and name  is an identifier, known as an attribute name of the object. Assignment to an attribute reference asks object obj to bind its attribute named name .

An indexing

Has the syntax obj[expr]. obj  and expr  are arbitrary expressions. Assignment to an indexing asks container obj  to bind its item indicated by the value of expr , also known as the index or key of the item in the container.

A slicing

Has the syntax obj[start:stop] or
obj[start:stop:stride]. obj, start, stop, and stride are arbitrary expressions. start , stop , and stride are all optional (i.e., obj[:stop:] and obj[:stop] are also syntactically correct slicings, equivalent to obj[None:stop:None]). Assignment to a slicing asks container obj  to bind or unbind some of its items. Assigning to a slicing such as obj[start:stop:stride] is equivalent to assigning to the indexing obj[slice(start, stop, stride)] , where slice is a Python built-in type (see slice on page 156) whose instances represent slices.

I'll come back to indexing and slicing targets when I discuss operations on lists, in "Modifying a list" on page 56, and on dictionaries, in "Indexing a Dictionary" on page 60.

When the target of the assignment is an identifier, the assignment statement specifies the binding of a variable. This is never disallowed: when you request it, it takes place. In all other cases, the assignment statement specifies a request to an object to bind one or more of its attributes or items. An object may refuse to create or rebind some (or all) attributes or items, raising an exception if you attempt a disallowed creation or rebinding (see also __setattr__ on page 108 and __setitem__ on page 112).

You can give multiple targets and equals signs (=) in a plain assignment. For example:

  a = b = c = 0

binds variables a, b, and c to the same value, 0. Each time the statement executes, the RHS expression is evaluated just once, no matter how many targets are part of the statement. Each target then gets bound to the single object returned by the expression, just as if several simple assignments executed one after the other.

The target in a plain assignment can list two or more references separated by commas, optionally enclosed in parentheses or brackets. For example:

  a, b, c = x

This statement requires x to be an iterable with exactly three items, and binds a to the first item, b to the second, and c to the third. This kind of assignment is known as an unpacking assignment. The RHS expression must be an iterable with exactly as many items as there are references in the target; otherwise, Python raises an exception. Each reference in the target gets bound to the corresponding item in the RHS. An unpacking assignment can also be used to swap references:

  a, b = b, a

This assignment statement rebinds name a  to what name b  was bound to, and vice versa.