"the children voted for {ice creamformatcounter(responsesmost_common( )[ ][ presumablyyou' get the responses from database or by using complicated vision algorithm to count the kids who raised their hands herewe hardcode it so that we can test the most_common method it returns list that has only one element (because we requested one element in the parameterthis element stores the name of the top choice at position zerohence the double [ ][ at the end of the call think they look like surprised facedon' youyour computer is probably amazed it can count data so easily it' ancestorhollerith' tabulating machine for the us censusmust be so jealouslists lists are the least object-oriented of python' data structures while lists arethemselvesobjectsthere is lot of syntax in python to make using them as painless as possible unlike many other object-oriented languageslists in python are simply available we don' need to import them and rarely need to call methods on them we can loop over list without explicitly requesting an iterator objectand we can construct list (as with dictionarywith custom syntax furtherlist comprehensions and generator expressions turn them into veritable swiss-army knife of computing functionality we won' go into too much detail of the syntaxyou've seen it in introductory tutorials across the web and in previous examples in this book you can' code python very long without learning how to use listsinsteadwe'll be covering when lists should be usedand their nature as objects if you don' know how to create or append to listhow to retrieve items from listor what "slice notationisi direct you to the official python tutorialpost-haste it can be found online at tutorialin pythonlists should normally be used when we want to store several instances of the "sametype of objectlists of strings or lists of numbersmost oftenlists of objects we've defined ourselves lists should always be used when we want to store items in some kind of order oftenthis is the order in which they were insertedbut they can also be sorted by some criteria as we saw in the case study from the previous lists are also very useful when we need to modify the contentsinsert to or delete from an arbitrary location of the listor update value within the list