List

This is the most basic Python data structure; it stores a collection of values. While you can store any data type as an element in a Python list, for our purpose of data visualization, we mostly handle lists of numerical values as data input, or at, most, lists with elements of the same data type, such as strings to store text labels.

A list is specified by square brackets, []. To initiate an empty list, assign [] to a variable by l = []. To create a list, we can write the following:

fibonacci = [1,1,2,3,5,8,13]

Sometimes, we may want to get a list of arithmetic sequences. We may do so by using list(range(start,stop,step)).

See the following example:

In [1]: fifths = list(range(10,30,5))
        fifths
Out[1]: [10, 15, 20, 25]

In [2]: list(range(10,30,5))==[10, 15, 20, 25]
Out[2]: True