So, in the third video (Twitter/YouTube), we looked at some of the simpler reasons why you might want to initialise a variable and a quick shortcut you can use to initialise multiple variables as once.

In this tutorial, I'll be using Python 3.8 with the IDLEX extensions installed.

There are a number of reasons why we might want to initialise a variable value …

• It may well be that we want to increment or decrement it. If we wanted to initialise a variable that we could increment, we may start it off on a fairly low value, like 0. If we wanted to initialise a variable that we could decrement, we may start it off on a slightly higher value, maybe even 100.
• We may also want to initialise a variable that we can append values to. In that case, we'd normally initialise it as an empty list.
• Finally, we may want to initialise a variable to use as a flag. A flag is used to indicate whether something has, or hasn't, happened yet.

It's quite normal to initialise variables one at a time, so for instance ...

>>> total = 0
>>> shopping = []
>>> finished = False

But if you have to initialise more than one variable that we wanted to initialise with the same function, we could initialise them like this ...

>>> total = maximum = 0
>>> shopping = bought = []
>>> finished = found = False

Nice, eh?