Difference between list(numpy_array) and numpy_array.tolist()

Question

What is the difference between applying list() on a numpy array vs. calling tolist()?

I was checking the types of both output

Answer 1

.tolist() appears to convert all of the values recursively to python primitives (list), whereas list creates a python list from an iterable. Since the numpy array is an array of arrays, list(...) creates a list of arrays

You can think of list as a function that looks like this:

# Not the actually implementation, just for demo purposes
def  list(iterable):
    newlist = []
    for obj in iter(iterable):
        newlist.append(obj)
    return newlist