Editing Community Data Science Course (Spring 2019)/Day 2 Lecture (section)

=== Lists ===

* purpose
** Stores things ''in order''
* initialization
** making a list called my list: <code>my_list = ["a", "b", "c"]</code>
** comma separated elements. in python they can be a mix of any kind of types
** <code>type(my_list)</code>
* <tt>len()</tt> review
* accessing elements
** indexing like my_list[0]
** indexing starts from the front and we ''start counting at 0''
** we go from the end with negative numbers
** what happens if we try to move outside of the range? ('''error!'')
* adding elements
** using the the <code>my_list.append()</code> function
** the <code>.append()</code> function is a special kind of function that lists know about
** compare to <code>print</code> which is a global function.
* changing elements
** replacing elements like <code>my_list[0] = "foo"</code>
* finding elements in list
** e.g., <code>"z" in my_list</code>
* slicing lists
** the colon inside the [] is the ''slicing syntax''
** e.g., <code>my_list[0:2]</code> is 0th up to, but not including, the 2nd
** e.g., <code>my_list[2:]</code> 
** e.g., <code>my_list[:2]</code>
** e.g., <code>my_list[:]</code>
* strings are like lists
** we can slice lists
** len()
*** <code>len("")</code> length of the empty string
* many other interesting functions for lists
** e.g., <code>min()</code> and <code>max()</code>
** e.g., create a list of names and sort it <code>names.sort()</code>
** search "python lists" in any search engine to see many more functions that list knows about.