Returning a splat

[Clunk_Head]

The only thing I can think of is to rewrite bar so it can do the unpacking itself.

I was afraid that might be the answer. I failed to mention that bar is part of matplotlib, so that makes it a lot tougher.

To expand, foo makes the parameters for plt.legend()
bar is called as:

legend_params = foo(names, colors)
plt.legend(*legend_params)

In my quest for succinctness I may have over simplified my example.