title: Different ways of clearing lists
body: <p>Is there any reason to do anything more complicated than one of these two lines when you want to clear a list in Python?</p>
  
  <pre><code>old_list = []
  old_list = list()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The reason I ask is that I just saw this in some running code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>del old_list[ 0:len(old_list) ]
  </code></pre>