Well yes arrays do exist, and no they're not different to lists when it comes to things like del
and append
:
>>> from array import array
>>> foo = array('i', range(5))
>>> foo
array('i', [0, 1, 2, 3, 4])
>>> del foo[:]
>>> foo
array('i')
>>> foo.append(42)
>>> foo
array('i', [42])
>>>
Differences worth noting: you need to specify the type when creating the array, and you save storage at the expense of extra time converting between the C type and the Python type when you do arr[i] = expression
or arr.append(expression)
, and lvalue = arr[i]