John Machin wrote:
Deletion occurs *only* in the corner case where there are no "assigned
elements" i.e. only if the RHS list (sequence) is *empty*.
Oh, it was my understanding that deletion always occurs, even when the
section is being assigned a non-empty value, i.e. delete the slice and
insert new value.
Otherwise
there would be no point at all in the language having assignment to a
slice -- del L[0:2] would suffice.
Right, but I'm wondering why a statement like
L[0:2] = []
doesn't assign an empty list as the new element in L. For example:
L = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
L[0:2] = []
Why doesn't L now equal [[], 3, 4, 5] as it does with an index assignment?
>>> L[0:2] = tuple('foobar')
>>> L
['f', 'o', 'o', 'b', 'a', 'r', 3, 4, 5]
Hmm...why doesn't L equal [('f', 'o', 'o', 'b', 'a', 'r'), 3, 4, 5] ?
Shouldn't L be a 4 item list instead of 9?
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