On Apr 12, 3:29 pm, "Scott" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm sorry if most of my question's seem "petty", but as I've said before, I > need to know the petty just because I need to know. > > This question is more along the lines of just having you guys either agree > or disgree with me, and if disagreeing to give the reasoning behind it, to > further my understanding of lists. >
Please forgo the psychological self analysis from your future posts. > Am I safe in assuming that if the list your building contains number's it > will be written as follows: > > >>>my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] > > But the minute you throw in something that's not a number it has to be > written as: > > >>>my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 'five'] > >>> my_list > > [1, 2, 3, 4, 'five'] > > Unless five was defined, then it could be written as: > > >>>five = 5 > >>>my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, five] > >>> my_list > > [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] > > Is this the correct way of thinking? Or am I, by thinking this is the case, > crippling myself in my potential as a programmer I don't think your question has anything to do with lists. Maybe this will help: there is a distinction between what are called "literals" and "variables". A variable is created like this: num = 10 num is a variable. It's called a variable because it's value can "vary": num = 20 On the other hand the value 10 cannot vary, so it is not a variable. What is it? It's called a "literal". Here are some examples of literals: 10 --- integer literal 3.5 --- float literal "hello" --- string literal Literals are the values you can assign to variables. Finally, any name without quotes around it is variable and it refers to a value which python will substitute in place of that name(that doesn't apply to python keywords like if, while, etc.) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list