[FIXED] Static Arrays in Python

Issue

I am learning how to program in python and am also learning theory as part of a computer science course. In programming i know that i can add additional variables to an array just by using the .append function, however in my theory classes we are told that arrays can neither be increase nor decreased in size.

How does this work in python?

Solution

Python uses resizable vectors under the hood. They maintain knowledge of how many elements are in the list as well as what the current total capacity is. When you try to add another element beyond the size of the collection, it allocates a new array with more capacity and populates it with the pointers to items from the original backing array. This is similar to java's ArrayList type, except that there's no way to specify the capacity in python

A detailed post on the implementation is here: http://www.laurentluce.com/posts/python-list-implementation/

They are not linked lists; there's no linked list type built into python, and the performance patterns are different.

Answered By - Daenyth