Python: Master the Art of Design Patterns

Lists

Lists are the least object-oriented of Python's data structures. While lists are, themselves, objects, there is a lot of syntax in Python to make using them as painless as possible. Unlike many other object-oriented languages, lists in Python are simply available. We don't need to import them and rarely need to call methods on them. We can loop over a list without explicitly requesting an iterator object, and we can construct a list (as with a dictionary) with custom syntax. Further, list comprehensions and generator expressions turn them into a veritable Swiss-army knife of computing functionality.

We won't go into too much detail of the syntax; you've seen it in introductory tutorials across the Web and in previous examples in this book. ...