Interesting "gotme"

[Andrew Henshaw]

I got bit by this for a couple of minutes the other day. Perhaps mentioning
it here will help someone else.  On the other hand, perhaps I'm the only
person silly enough to not see this right away.

I had a list that I wanted to sort, except that I wanted the 0th element to
stay put.  So I smugly coded:

a[1:].sort()

and went on my merry way.  Later, I tracked down a bug  to the fact that I
really had not sorted a[1:].  Of course, I had sorted a copy of a[1:], which
was immediately discarded.

Cheers,

AH