I am a little confused about this one. In one of my scripts i have the following method.

```
ALIVES = []

def insert_in_alives(num):
    ALIVES.append(num)
    print len(ALIVES), "alives found."

```

Here ALIVES is just a list declared outside the method. But whenever the `update_alives` method is called it always print the following, No matter what the actual length of `ALIVES` is.

```
>>>1 alives found.

```

Can somebody tell me why is it doing so ?

UPDATE:

tried it in the shell and it works:

```
In [2]: a = [1,2,3]

In [3]: print len(a)
3
In [4]: def test(num):
   ...:     a.append(num)
   ...:     print len(a)
   ...:     

In [5]: test(5)
4

In [6]: test(7)
5

```