emptying a list

[Jon Clements]

On 1 Oct, 16:30, "lallous" <lall... at lgwm.org> wrote:
> Hello
>
> What is faster when clearing a list?
>
> del L[:]
>
> or
>
> L = []
>
> --
> Elias

Does it really matter that much?

And you're really talking about two different things, which quite
often come up on this group.

Example follows:

>>> x = range(5)
>>> x = y
>>> print x, y
[1, 2, 3, 4] [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> x = []
>>> print x, y
[] [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> x = y
>>> print x, y
[1, 2, 3, 4] [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> del x[:]
>>> print x, y
[] []

Cheers,
Jon.