Technology

Like in most reasonable languages. Linked lists would be a terrible implementation for a list where grabbing arbitrary indices is explicitly supported.

And even then, many linked list implementations maintain an updated size or length because checking that is a pretty common operation. So even if that is the implementation, it would still be fast because len(list) is a very common operation so they'd definitely optimize it.

I comment because this is how a social network works, and this is how you keep lemmy alive. My comment has generated a dozen of other comments, so he achieved his goal.

There is not a single question that's already have been answered on internet, so there no point on asking anything on social plateforms except just for the sake of interacting with other peoples.

Lemmy is not stackoverflow 😉

Don't know how list are implemented in Python. But in the dumb linked list implementation (like C++ std::list), each element has a "next" member that point the the next element. So, to have list length, you have to do (pseudo code, not actual python code):

len = 0
elt = list.fisrt
while exist(elt):
    elt = elt.next
    len++
return len

Whereas to test if list is empty, you just have to:

return exist(list.first)

The list is not necessarily empty. If you were sure it was, why check?