pop() clarification

[7stud]

On Apr 11, 10:44 am, "Scott" <s_brosci... at comcast.net> wrote:
> As said before I'm new to programming, and I need in depth explaination to
> understand everything the way I want to know it, call it a personality quirk
> ;p.
>
> With pop() you remove the last element of a list and return its value:
>
> Now I know list is a bad name, but for the sake of arguement lets assume its
> not a built in sequence>
>
> >>>list = ['this', 'is', 'an', 'example']
> >>>list.pop()
> 'example'
> >>>list
>
> ['this', 'is', 'an']
>
> I understand all that.  What I don't understand is why all the documentation
> I see says, "When removing a specific element from a list using pop() it
> must be in this format: list.pop([i]).
> At first I took that to mean that list.pop(i) would return some type of
> error, but it doesn't.

It's understandable that the definition of pop() is confusing in that
way.  It looks like the argument should be a list.  As others have
said, that is not what the brackets mean when the documents show the
formal definition of a function.  A clearer example might be a
function definition that requires some mandatory arguments and has
some optional arguments:

dict.get(key[, default])

That shows that the get() function requires one mandatory argument
"key" and that you can also send it one optional argument "default".
If a function were to require a list as an argument, it's definition
would be written something like this:

somefunc(aList)  -- where 'aList' is a list of integers