This page says that Python lists are often flexible arrays http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus7/html/page82.html
but also says that their representation is implementation dependent. As far as I see this should mean that element access in Python should run in constant time. Now if so this is a boon, because generally 'A list is a sequence of elements, but it is not a single primitive object; it is made of cons cells, one cell per element. Finding the nth element requires looking through n cons cells, so elements farther from the beginning of the list take longer to access. But it is possible to add elements to the list, or remove elements.' (from http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemnet/use/info/elisp/elisp_7.html) But are Python lists also indistinguishable from conventional Lisplists for list processing. For example, can I modify a Python list non-destructively? Are they equivalent to Lisp lists. Can CAR and CDR in Lisp be thought of as def car (x): return x[0] def cdr (x): return x[1:] The idea of a list in which elements can be accessed in constant time is novel to me. Mark -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
