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Bounds Checking

Although lists have no fixed size, Python still doesn’t allow us to reference items that are not present. Indexing off the end of a list is always a mistake, but so is assigning off the end:

>>> L
[123, 'spam', 'NI']

>>> L[99]
...error text omitted...
IndexError: list index out of range

>>> L[99] = 1
...error text omitted...
IndexError: list assignment index out of range

This is intentional, as it’s usually an error to try to assign off the end of a list (and a particularly nasty one in the C language, which doesn’t do as much error checking as Python). Rather than silently growing the list in response, Python reports an error. To grow a list, we call list methods such as append instead.