Andy Buckley <a...@insectnation.org> added the comment:

Still not convinced with the reasoning, I'm afraid, but I certainly agree that 
modifications to built-ins are not to be made lightly. Using deques, which are 
far less familiar, is not a particularly natural thing to do for a search path, 
and of course can't be used with a built-in list to which you might well wish 
to prepend: sys.path.

Personally, I would have no problem with a list pop_front method ;) I 
understand the connection of API availability and misuse of algorithmically 
inefficient methods -- for large lists -- but I don't find "be inconveniently 
absent so that users search for an answer and find out about complexity issues" 
a very compelling or Pythonic design aim. But I admit that l.insert(0, x) is 
not such a hard idiom to learn -- just a bit less syntactically elegant and 
self-explanatory than I would prefer for a simple task, especially where I've 
already conciously made the efficiency decision in my choice of container type.

But thanks for listening... as mentioned, this can stay here as a reference for 
further enquiries (I searched for a pre-existing prepend() request before 
submitting this ticket, of course!) and I'll go visit python-ideas. Cheers!

----------

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue9080>
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