I have a piece of code here that is supposed to return the least common element in a list of elements, ordered by commonality:
From collections import counter c = counte
The notation list means a list of something (but i'm not saying what).
Since the code in test works for any kind of object in the list, this works as a formal method parameter.
Using a type parameter.
I swapped the order of the sub-questions to make this more useful for the most common case that most beginners are searching for.
Also, the question/top answer have 2 million views but very few upvotes.
The first way works for a list or a string;
The second way only works for a list, because slice assignment isn't allowed for strings.
Other than that i think the only difference is speed:
It looks like it's a little.
The first, [:], is creating a slice (normally often used for getting just part of a list), which happens to contain the entire list, and thus is effectively a copy of the list.
The second, list(), is using the actual.