List size versus list allocation

[Steven D'Aprano]

Python lists are over-allocated: whenever they need to be resized, they 
are made a little bit larger than necessary so that appends will be fast.

See:

http://code.python.org/hg/trunk/file/e9d930f8b8ff/Objects/listobject.c

I'm interested in gathering some statistics on this, and to do so I need 
a way of measuring the list's logical size versus its actual size. The 
first is easy: it's just len(list). Is there some way of getting the 
allocated size of the list?



-- 
Steven