Is '[' a function or an operator or an language feature?

[python at bdurham.com]

Tim,

> 2.x?! You were lucky. We lived for three months with Python 1.x in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, write our 1.x code using ed, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down in machine language, fourteen hours a day, 
week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad
would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt...

Luxury. Our computers only had 256 bytes[1] of RAM and We had to enter
our code, in the dark, using loose binary toggle switches with poor
connections. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in
the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at
the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat
us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

Cheers,
Malcolm

[1] http://incolor.inebraska.com/bill_r/elf/html/elf-1-33.htm