[DrewG]

His argument is that Python beginners won't be familiar with slice syntax, and if they encounter it in someone else's code they won't understand.

[wx77]

I actually have to agree if you are coming to something like

    a = b[:]

in code you are going to understand what it means or you are probably going to be missing a large portion of other things that are going on in the python code.

With that said I must also state that I think

    a = list(b)

is much prettier and is easier to understand to me.

[pmiller2]

They need to learn it, then. Honestly, anyone who read and comprehended my first post now understands slice notation (with the exception of the more rarely used stride argument), so it's not like it's a ton of effort. Unless the post author is claiming that slice notation itself is cryptic, I don't even understand where he's coming from.

[ceol]

I happen to agree that it's more intuitive to use list() instead of slice notation, but back when I had no idea about slice notation and first saw it, it caused me to wonder what else could be done with it. After some reading, I learned a lot more about different slice tricks than I would have if I were just presented with list().