On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Andrew Robinson <andr...@r3dsolutions.com> wrote: > The list was generated in a single pass by many .append() 's, and then > copied once -- the original was left in place; and then I attempted to slice > it.
Note that if the list was generated by .appends, then it was copied more than once. Python reserves a specific amount of space for the list. When it grows past that, the list must be reallocated and copied. It grows the list exponentially in order to keep the amortized time complexity of append at O(1), but the point is that a list of 20 million items is going to be resized and copied several times before it is complete. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
