What's the idiomatic syntax for prepending to a short python list?

Question

list.append() is the obvious choice for adding to the end of a list. Here\'s a reasonable explanation for the missing list.prepend(). Assuming my

Answer 1

If someone finds this question like me, here are my performance tests of proposed methods:

Python 2.7.8

In [1]: %timeit ([1]*1000000).insert(0, 0)
100 loops, best of 3: 4.62 ms per loop

In [2]: %timeit ([1]*1000000)[0:0] = [0]
100 loops, best of 3: 4.55 ms per loop

In [3]: %timeit [0] + [1]*1000000
100 loops, best of 3: 8.04 ms per loop

As you can see, insert and slice assignment are as almost twice as fast than explicit adding and are very close in results. As Raymond Hettinger noted insert is more common option and I, personally prefer this way to prepend to list.