6.10. Lists

Like strings, lists provide sequential storage through an index offset and access to single or consecutive elements through slices. However, the comparisons usually end there. Strings consist only of characters and are immutable (cannot change individual elements) while lists are flexible container objects which hold an arbitrary number of Python objects. Creating lists is simple; adding to lists is easy, too, as we see in the following examples.

The objects that you can place in a list can include standard types and objects as well as user-defined ones. Lists can contain different types of objects and are more flexible than an array of C structs or Python arrays (available through the external array module) because arrays are restricted to containing objects of a single type. Lists can be populated, empty, sorted, and reversed. Lists can be grown and shrunk. They can be taken apart and put together with other lists. Individual or multiple items can be inserted, updated, or removed at will.