Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Tue, 11 Apr 2006 14:49:04 -0700, Ville Vainio wrote: > >> John Salerno wrote: >> >>> Thanks guys, your explanations are really helpful. I think what had me >>> confused at first was my understanding of what L[:] does on either side >>> of the assignment operator. On the left, it just chooses those elements >>> and edits them in place; on the right, it makes a copy of that list, >>> right? (Which I guess is still more or less *doing* the same thing, just >>> for different purposes) >> Interestingly, if it was just a "clear" method nobody would be confused. > > Even more importantly, you could say help(list.clear) and learn something > useful, instead of trying help(del) and getting a syntax error. [snip more reasons to add list.clear()]
I think these are all good reasons for adding a clear method, but being that it has been so hotly contended in the past, I don't think it will get added without a PEP. Anyone out there willing to take out the best examples from this thread and turn it into a PEP? STeVe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
