Two aces up Python's sleeve

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:

last_item = my_list[ -1 ]
Way cleaner than my_list[ len( my_list )- 1 ], don't you think?

  In "The Mental Game of Python," Raymond Hettinger spills the
  beans about our noggins only being able to juggle 7 +/- 2
  things in our short-term memory.

  So, "last_item = my_list[ -1 ]" might still make the cut,
  while "my_list[ len( my_list)- 1 ]" could be biting off
  more than we can chew.

|The problem is, the number of brain registers this uses is
|10. This is no longer a decryption effort. This is a puzzle.
|At the moment you put it together, you fully understand it.
|But if this is embedded in bigger code, every time you hit
|this line, you're going to have to pick apart "what does this
|thing do?".
Raymond Hettinger