Occasionally when you try to attack a python in melee, you instead swap places with it and get the message: “It slithers around you; S, @ = @, S.” (replacing the @ with the hero’s glyph if they are different). This is a reference to multiple variable assignment in the Python language.

If the hero can be represented by S themselves, the displacement never happens, because S, S = S, S is not syntactically correct in some versions of Python (though it is in current versions).