Lists

Lists are the least object-oriented of Python's data structures. While lists are, themselves, objects, there is a lot of syntax in Python to make using them as painless as possible. Unlike many other object-oriented languages, lists in Python are simply available. We don't need to import them and rarely need to call methods on them. We can loop over a list without explicitly requesting an iterator object, and we can construct a list (as with a dictionary) with custom syntax. Further, list comprehensions and generator expressions turn them into a veritable Swiss-army knife of computing functionality.

We won't go into too much detail of the syntax; you've seen it in introductory tutorials across the Web and in previous examples in this book. You can't code Python very long without learning how to use lists! Instead, we'll be covering when lists should be used, and their nature as objects. If you don't know how to create or append to a list, how to retrieve items from a list, or what ...