In article <hje979$kc...@news.eternal-september.org>, "Alf P. Steinbach" <al...@start.no> wrote:
> But it would IMHO have been better if it wasn't called "list", which brings > in the wrong associations for someone used to other languages. +1. When I first started using Python (back in the 1.4 days), I assumed a list was a singly-linked list. Which, of course, leads to the assumption that pop(0) is O(1), and lots of other wrong thinking(*). Oddly enough, I was going to write in the above paragraph, "like a C++ STL list", until I happened to glance at the STL docs and refreshed my memory that an STL list is doubly-linked. Which just goes to show that making assumptions based on names is a bad idea. So, we're right back to my statement earlier in this thread that the docs are deficient in that they describe behavior with no hint about cost. Given that, it should be no surprise that users make incorrect assumptions about cost. (*) I suspect somebody is going to point out that list.pop was added in some version later than 1.4, but that's a detail. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
