Clean Code in Python

Indexes and slices

In Python, as in other languages, some data structures or types support accessing its elements by index. Another thing it has in common with most programming languages is that the first element is placed in the index number zero. However, unlike those languages, when we want to access the elements in a different order than usual, Python provides extra features.

For example, how would you access the last element of an array in C? This is something I did the first time I tried Python. Thinking the same way as in C, I would get the element in the position of the length of the array minus one. This could work, but we could also use a negative index number, which will start counting from the last, as shown in the following ...