Intro to Python for Computer Science and Data Science: Learning to Program with AI, Big Data and The Cloud

5.2 Lists

Here, we discuss lists in more detail and explain how to refer to particular list elements. Many of the capabilities shown in this section apply to all sequence types.

Creating a List

Lists typically store homogeneous data, that is, values of the same data type. Consider the list c, which contains five integer elements:

In [1]: c = [-45, 6, 0, 72, 1543]

In [2]: c
Out[2]: [-45, 6, 0, 72, 1543]

They also may store heterogeneous data, that is, data of many different types. For example, the following list contains a student’s first name (a string), last name (a string), grade point average (a float) and graduation year (an int):

['Mary', 'Smith', 3.57, 2022]

Accessing Elements of a List

You reference a list element by writing ...