Deleting the first element of a list
Delaney, Timothy
tdelaney at avaya.com
Wed Oct 2 21:12:02 EDT 2002
> From: Greg Ewing [mailto:see_reply_address at something.invalid]
>
> I say "probably" because intuitions about this sort
> of thing are sometimes wrong in Python. The only
> way to find out for sure is by experiment.
One reason why there may not be any perceptable difference is that del x[0]
will need to move all the rest of the data in the current implementation
i.e. you have:
del x[0]:
Move x[1:] to x[:-1]
x = x[1:]
Create new list
Copy x[1:] into new list
So basically, do whichever feels more natural to you.
The real advantage of
x = x[1:]
is that it won't blow up if x is empty. Of course, you may also *want* it
to blow up in that case.
Tim Delaney
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