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Slice semantics potentially differ per object; new semantics can be introduced when operator overloading the indexing operator. With Python standard lists (which are dynamic arrays), every slice is a copy. Slices of NumPy arrays, by contrast, are views onto the same underlying buffer.
Slice indexes may be omitted—for example, a [:] returns a copy of the entire list. Each element of a slice is a shallow copy. In Python, a distinction between expressions and statements is rigidly enforced, in contrast to languages such as Common Lisp, Scheme, or Ruby. This leads to duplicating some functionality. For example:
This method usually, in turn, calls the clone() method of its parent class to obtain a copy, and then does any custom copying procedures. Eventually this gets to the clone() method of Object (the uppermost class), which creates a new instance of the same class as the object and copies all the fields to the new instance (a "shallow copy").
In other array types, a slice can be replaced by an array of different size, with subsequent elements being renumbered accordingly – as in Python's list assignment A[5:5] = [10,20,30], that inserts three new elements (10, 20, and 30) before element "A[5]".
Using this technique, when a user asks the system to copy an object, it instead merely creates a new reference that still points to the same object. As soon as a user attempts to modify the object through a particular reference, the system makes a real copy, applies the modification to that, and sets the reference to refer to the new copy.
In computer science, a dynamic array, growable array, resizable array, dynamic table, mutable array, or array list is a random access, variable-size list data structure that allows elements to be added or removed. It is supplied with standard libraries in many modern mainstream programming languages.
The slice is defined for a slicing criterion C=(x,v) where x is a statement in program P and v is variable in x. A static slice includes all the statements that can affect the value of variable v at statement x for any possible input.
The following list contains syntax examples of how a range of element of an array can be accessed. In the following table: first – the index of the first element in the slice; last – the index of the last element in the slice; end – one more than the index of last element in the slice; len – the length of the slice (= end - first)