Type-Specific Operations

Python’s lists are related to arrays in other languages, but they tend to be more powerful. For one thing, they have no fixed type constraint—the list we just looked at, for example, contains three objects of completely different types (an integer, a string, and a floating-point number). Further, lists have no fixed size. That is, they can grow and shrink on demand, in response to list-specific operations:

>>> L.append('NI')                  # Growing: add object at end of list
>>> L
[123, 'spam', 1.23, 'NI']

>>> L.pop(2)                        # Shrinking: delete an item in the middle
1.23

>>> L                               # "del L[2]" deletes from a list too
[123, 'spam', 'NI']

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Here, the list append method expands the list’s size and inserts an item at the end; the pop method (or an equivalent del statement) then removes an item at a given offset, causing the list to shrink. Other list methods insert an item at an arbitrary position (insert), remove a given item by value (remove), and so on. Because lists are mutable, most list methods also change the list object in-place, instead of creating a new one:

>>> M = ['bb', 'aa', 'cc']
>>> M.sort()
>>> M
['aa', 'bb', 'cc']
>>> M.reverse()
>>> M
['cc', 'bb', 'aa']

The list sort method here, for example, orders the list in ascending fashion by default, and reverse reverses it—in both cases, the methods modify the list directly.