On Feb 7, 2008, at 3:19 PM, James Turk wrote: > if you do > a = [1,2,3] > b = [] > b = a > > then assign: b[1] = 9 > now a[1] == 9 as well > > with a[:] = b you are actually getting a copy of the list rather than > an alias
Of course, this only works if 'b' is already a list. A more common and more general usage for making list copies would be: a = [1,2,3] b = a[:] In this usage, 'a' and 'b' are separate lists, but 'b' doesn't need to be defined as a list first. -- Ed Leafe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list