Jumping around when assigning elements

[Matthew Sims]

Python Newbie here. This is my first time learning object-oriented
programming and trying to break out of the usual Korn/Perl/PHP style
of programming. Having some difficulty understand some items.

For lists, I understand this:
C=["need","some","help"]
print C[1]
some

But I can't seem to do this:
C[3]="here"

I know about C.append("here") but this brings me to my question...

Is there anyway to assign to an element that wasn't defined in the
beginning? Like if I wanted element 5 assigned but not element 4
without using "" or None?

I'm currently re-writing a Perl script into Python and with Perl I was
free to assign any element in the array without having to fill in the
previous elements. I can't seem to do that in Python...unless I'm
doing it wrong.

Thanks
--Matt