What do ellipsis […] mean in a list?

Question

I was playing around in python. I used the following code in IDLE:

p  = [1, 2]
p[1:1] = [p]
print p

The output was:

[1, [.         


        

Answer 1

As I understood, this is an example of fixed point

p  = [1, 2]
p[1:1] = [p]
f = lambda x:x[1]
f(p)==p
f(f(p))==p