Different ways of clearing lists

Question

Is there any reason to do anything more complicated than one of these two lines when you want to clear a list in Python?

old_list = [] 

old_list = list()

The reason I ask is that I just saw this in some running code:

del old_list[ 0:len(old_list) ]

Answer 1

By using del list_name[:] you can clear lists.

Example code is as follows:-

>>> a = [1, 2, 3] 

>>> b = a 

>>> del a[:] 

>>> print 

a, b [] []