Vassilios Karakoidas Weblog

Looking around in wikipedia … saw that and found it very amusing.

In the general sense, daemon is an older form of the word demon. In the Unix System Administration Handbook, Evi Nemeth states the following about daemons:

Many people equate the word “daemon” with the word “demon”, implying some kind of satanic connection between UNIX and the underworld. This is an egregious misunderstanding. “Daemon” is actually a much older form of “demon”; daemons have no particular bias towards good or evil, but rather serve to help define a person’s character or personality. The ancient Greeks’ concept of a “personal daemon” was similar to the modern concept of a “guardian angel” — eudaemonia is the state of being helped or protected by a kindly spirit. As a rule, UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons. (p.403)

Liszt, around 1840, playing piano for Beethoven and surrounded by Hugo, Paganini, Rossini, Lamartine, Sand and Marie d'Agoult (seated on the floor). Painting by Josef Danhauser.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liszt

Lets have a look at the following example:

bkarak@linux-uho3:~> python
Python 2.6 (r26:66714, Feb  3 2009, 20:52:03)
[GCC 4.3.2 [gcc-4_3-branch revision 141291]] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> a = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
>>> a
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>>> a[1:]
[2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>>> a[1:].extend(a[:2])
>>> a[1:] + a[:2]
[2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 1, 2]

I am trying to concatenate two slices from a python list, using the extend method.

“| extend(…)
| L.extend(iterable) — extend list by appending elements from the iterable”

Why this does not work? … the list concatenation works fine with the “+” operator.