How to find all positions of the maximum value in a list?

a.index(max(a))

will tell you the index of the first instance of the largest valued element of list a.

The chosen answer (and most others) require at least two passes through the list.
Here's a one pass solution which might be a better choice for longer lists.

Edited: To address the two deficiencies pointed out by @John Machin. For (2) I attempted to optimize the tests based on guesstimated probability of occurrence of each condition and inferences allowed from predecessors. It was a little tricky figuring out the proper initialization values for max_val and max_indices which worked for all possible cases, especially if the max happened to be the first value in the list — but I believe it now does.

def maxelements(seq):
    ''' Return list of position(s) of largest element '''
    max_indices = []
    if seq:
        max_val = seq[0]
        for i,val in ((i,val) for i,val in enumerate(seq) if val >= max_val):
            if val == max_val:
                max_indices.append(i)
            else:
                max_val = val
                max_indices = [i]

    return max_indices

>>> m = max(a)
>>> [i for i, j in enumerate(a) if j == m]
[9, 12]