[Python-Dev] re: Tutorial: Brief Introduction to the Standard Library (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Dec 4 18:27:28 EST 2003

At 02:27 PM 12/4/03 -0700, Kevin J. Butler wrote:

The opposite question, "What is fundamentally wrong with list[:]..." has an easy answer:

It takes experience or explanation of slicing to know what it does. copy(list) is easy even for novices to understand. When I know my code will be read by people unfamiliar with Python, I tend to annotate use of slices something like: list[:] # copy the list Python usually makes it easier to avoid sacrificing clarity on the altar of micro-optimization, but since the slice is the idiomatically correct way to spell copy(list) in Python, that's the way to write it.

Well, dictionaries have a .copy() method; lists could also grow one.

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