Array vs List: Understanding Differences

Hey everyone! 🙌

Today marks Day 01 of my DSA journey, and I’ve started by diving into something fundamental yet super important — Arrays and Lists in python While they may seem similar, they have distinct use cases and behaviors.

What’s a List in Python?

List is a class
List is mutable
List can grow ( dynamic array)
List can contain different type elements
List elements are indexed

What’s an Array in Python?

Collection of same type of elements
Flexible size
Indexed
Arrays in Python come from the array module.

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Arrays in languages like C/C++ are fixed-size by default, Python's array.array is resizable

Define Array -

This module defines an object type which can efficiently represent an array of basis values

eg - character, integer, floating point numbers

Creating Array

from array import *
a1 = array(typecode, [,elements])

Typecode	C Type
‘b’	signed integer
‘B’	unsigned integer
‘u’	unicode character
‘h’	signed character
‘i’	signed integer

Example

from array import *
a1 = array("i", [23,34,42]
print(a1)

📘 Day 01 – Arrays vs Lists in Python | My DSA Journey Begins 💻