Creating a List of Empty Lists

[Fuzzyman]

Pythons internal 'pointers' system is certainly causing me a few
headaches..... When I want to copy the contents of a variable I find
it impossible to know whether I've copied the contents *or* just
created a new pointer to the original value....

For example I wanted to initialize a list of empty lists....

a=[ [], [], [], [], [] ] 

I thought there has to be a *really* easy way of doing it - after a
bit of hacking I discovered that :
a = [[]]*10 appeared to work

however - using it in my program called bizarre crashes....
I eventually discovered that (as a silly example) :
a = [[]]*10
b=-1 
while b < 10:
    b += 1
    a[b] = b
print a 

Produced :
[ [9], [9], [9]......

Which isn't at all what I intended...............
What is the correct, quick way of doing this (without using a loop and
appending...) ?

Fuzzyman



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