Are all items in list the same?

[Peter Otten]

Bob van der Poel wrote:

> I need to see if all the items in my list are the same. I was using set()
> for this, but that doesn't work if items are themselves lists. So,
> assuming that a is a list of some things, the best I've been able to come
> up with it:
> 
>     if a.count( targ ) == len(a):
> 
> I'm somewhat afraid that this won't scale all that well. Am I missing
> something?

a[1:] == a[:-1]

:)