Hans Georg Schaathun wrote:
0 is a number as real and existent as any other, one would think that the empty list is also as real and existent as any other list.
0 does have some special properties, though, such as being the additive identity and not having a multiplicative inverse. Adding falseness as another special property isn't too much of a stretch and turns out to be useful. Likewise, it's useful to treat empty containers as having a similar special property, since they're often a base or terminating case in algorithms. It's especially useful in a dynamic language where any additional operations such as finding the length or comparing with zero has a run-time cost. Yes, you have to learn it, but it's a small thing to learn with a considerable payoff. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
