But he could achieve exactly the same thing by using descriptive variable names without the angle brackets. Admittedly he can't use `list` as it's a built-in but `a_list` or `list_` would be much better than `<list>`.
My personal opinion is that `list_` is among the worst possible variable names (together with `bar` and `foo`). It's non-descriptive, ugly, hard to recognize, looks scary to beginners and maybe worst of all it's easy to forget the underscore when typing.