Different ways of clearing lists

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Clearing a list in place will affect all other references of the same list.

For example, this method doesn’t affect other references:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3]
>>> b = a
>>> a = []
>>> print(a)
[]
>>> print(b)
[1, 2, 3]

But this one does:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3]
>>> b = a
>>> del a[:]      # equivalent to   del a[0:len(a)]
>>> print(a)
[]
>>> print(b)
[]
>>> a is b
True

You could also do:

>>> a[:] = []

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