Creating a thread for the Class of 2025. Timeline for the 2025 National Merit Scholarship Competition. October, 2023 - Students take the PSAT April, 2024 - High School administrators validate eligibility of students. September, 2024 - Students will be notified if they are Commended or Semi-Finalists February, 2025 - Semi-finalists will be notified if they are Finalists March, 2025 - Merit ...
Did you make the Dean’s List this fall? RIT wants you to share your good news with friends and family through Merit. You should have received an email with a link to your Merit story. Merit lets ...
By using a : colon in the list index, you are asking for a slice, which is always another list. In Python you can assign values to both an individual item in a list, and to a slice of the list.
What is the difference between list [1] and list [1:] in Python?
The second, list(), is using the actual list type constructor to create a new list which has contents equal to the first list. (I didn't use it in the first example because you were overwriting that name in your code - which is a good example of why you don't want to do that!)
When reading, list is a reference to the original list, and list[:] shallow-copies the list. When assigning, list (re)binds the name and list[:] slice-assigns, replacing what was previously in the list. Also, don't use list as a name since it shadows the built-in.
The first way works for a list or a string; the second way only works for a list, because slice assignment isn't allowed for strings. Other than that I think the only difference is speed: it looks like it's a little faster the first way. Try it yourself with timeit.timeit () or preferably timeit.repeat ().