New submission from Andy Buckley <a...@insectnation.org>: I know that Python lists aren't designed for efficient prepending, but sometimes when working with small lists it's exactly what needs to be done (search path lists being a common example). For a programmer aware of the performance issue and having convinced themself that it's not a problem for their use-case, it's a niggle that there is no prepend() function for lists by direct analogy to the commonly-used append().
Writing l = ["foo"] + l, or something mucky based on l.insert(0, ...) or reverse/append/reverse is annoyingly asymmetric and no more performant. So I suggest that l.append(x) be added to the list interface, with a prominent warning in the documentation that it's not an efficient operation on that type (possibly mention the complexity scaling with list length). I think the role of the interface is to make simple things simple, not to make it difficult to do simple-but-inefficient things that people will do anyway ;) ---------- components: Library (Lib) messages: 108587 nosy: andybuckley priority: normal severity: normal status: open title: Provide list prepend method (even though it's not efficient) type: feature request versions: Python 2.6 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue9080> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
