Why is there no list.clear() method in python?

Question

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Why is there no list.clear() method in python? I\'ve found several questions here that say the correct way to do it is one of the followin

Answer 1

The question should be why clear was deemed necessary in the first place. The following works to clear any Python collection that I can think of.

def clear(x):
    return type(x)()

>>> s = {1, 2, 3}
>>> s
set([1, 2, 3])
>>> s = clear(s)
>>> s
set([])
>>> l = [1, 2, 3]
>>> l
[1, 2, 3]
>>> l = clear(l)
>>> l
[]