Disposable variables

Ever have a bunch of variables you get returned in a tuple, and you only want some of them? So you assign them to some useless variable like 'nothing' or 'deleteme' and hope that the optimizer will instantly garbage collect them away?

(user, user_type, ingorethis) = somefunction()

The correct way to do this is to use the _ variable. (underscore). Underscore is equivalent to perl's $_ variable: it contains the results of the last evaluated expression. This is sometimes useful if you're using the python shell as a calculator. So, it will instantly be overwritten.

(user, user_type, _) = somefunction()