Duncan Booth wrote: > Looking in the 'obvious' place in the Tutorial, section 5.1 'More on > Lists' I found in the immediately following section 5.2 'The del > statement':
I read the tutorial 6 years ago, and don't read it regularly. What's in the tutorial is not really important, what can be easily looked up in library reference or interctive prompt is. There is a bit of "elitism" regarding the defense of del lst[:]. Many python programmers are "casual" programmers (was it Tim Berners-Lee that explained how great python is for casual users?) who know the language but don't remember the way everything is done. Of course someone that uses python 8 hours a day instantly recall lst[:], but a casual one will more probably launch an ipython prompt and do: [ipython]|1> l = [] [ipython]|2> l. l.__add__ l.__getslice__ l.__ne__ l.append l.__class__ l.__gt__ l.__new__ l.count l.__contains__ l.__hash__ l.__reduce__ l.extend l.__delattr__ l.__iadd__ l.__reduce_ex__ l.index l.__delitem__ l.__imul__ l.__repr__ l.insert l.__delslice__ l.__init__ l.__reversed__ l.pop l.__doc__ l.__iter__ l.__rmul__ l.remove l.__eq__ l.__le__ l.__setattr__ l.reverse l.__ge__ l.__len__ l.__setitem__ l.sort l.__getattribute__ l.__lt__ l.__setslice__ l.__getitem__ l.__mul__ l.__str__ [ipython]|2> # wtf? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
