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vbrozik

opened on Jan 6, 2021

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In the Code Style chapter examples - Short Ways to Manipulate Lists there is an example "Add three to all list members."

"bad"

for i in range(len(a)):
    a[i] += 3

"good"

a = [i + 3 for i in a]

Unfortunately the "bad" and "good" examples do a different things:

• "bad" modifies the original list in place
• "good" creates a new modified list and does not change the original object - not exactly "Add three to all list members."

Although the "good" code looks cleaner the result could be unwanted for example in case of huge lists or required side-effect of modifying the original list. The code at least needs an explanation.

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1. dbader commented on Jan 6, 2021

   

   dbader

   on Jan 6, 2021

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   Thanks for flagging this -- want to send in a pull-request to update that section?
2. vbrozik commented on Feb 12, 2021

   

   vbrozik

   on Feb 12, 2021

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   Excuse my delayed reply. I am still learning Python a lot and in many cases I do not know what is the best way to perform certain task in the language. Also I am not sure if I know English good enough to contribute to an English book. So certainly I need a discussion first :)

   Regarding the example above I would explain:

   For large lists it could be inappropriate to create a new list to replace the old one because of memory requirements. In such cases the good solution is to modify the list in-place:

   for i, _ in enumerate(a):
       a[i] += 3

   PS: Originally I thought that the code below would be the right solution but as the original "good" solution it also creates a new list and only then it assigns its elements to the original list.

   a[:] = (i + 3 for i in a)

   See:

   • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53286531/assign-iterators-to-a-python-slice
   • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11877212/python-slice-assignment-of-generator-to-list

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