How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: The PreTeXt Interactive Edition

Using slices to delete list elements can be awkward and therefore error-prone. Python provides an alternative that is more readable. The del statement removes an element from a list by using its position.

As you might expect, del handles negative indices and causes a runtime error if the index is out of range. In addition, you can use a slice as an index for del. As usual, slices select all the elements up to, but not including, the second index, but do not cause runtime errors if the index limits go too far.