Beginner question - How to effectively pass a large list

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Jp Calderone <exarkun at intarweb.us>:
| On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 03:29:55PM -0800, Asun Friere wrote:
...
|> What surprised me was that the facially equivalent:
|> >>> def f (d=[]) :
|> ...    d += [0]
|> ...    print d
|> did not do so.  Apparently '+=' in regards to lists acts like
|> list.apppend, rather than as the assignment operator it looks like.
|
|   list.extend, to be more precise, or list.__iadd__ to be completely precise
| :)  The maybe-mutate-maybe-rebind semantics of += lead me to avoid its use
| in most circumstances.

This tacky feature certainly ought to be considered for the
chopping block in version 3, for exactly that reason.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com

PS. Good analysis, JR, I learned something from it.