Is there a nice(r) way of creating a list of uniform values? I'm currently using: list('0'*N), which makes a string and then chops it up into a list. I need it to create a NxN matrix: matrix = [list('0'*N) for i in range(N)] (elements need to be mutable afterwards, a shallow copy is bad) While this is short and concise, it also feels odd :)