Using list comprehensions
List comprehensions are a flexible, expressive way of writing Python expressions to create sequences of values. They make iterating over the input and building the resulting list implicit so that program authors and readers can focus on the important features of what the list represents. It is this concision that makes list comprehensions a Pythonic way of working with lists or sequences.
List comprehensions are built out of bits of Python syntax we have already seen. They are surrounded by square brackets ([]), which signify Python symbols for a literal list. They contain for elements in a list, which is how Python iterates over members of a collection. Optionally, they can filter elements out of a list using the familiar syntax of the if expression.
Exercise 100 – introducing list comprehensions
In this exercise, you will be writing a program that creates a list of cubes of whole numbers from 1 to 5. This example is trivial because we’...