Is an Empty List in Python "None"?

Although, in a boolean context, an empty list ([]) and None are both falsy values, they're not the same:

# in a boolean context, `[]` and `None` are falsy
print(bool([]) == bool(None)) # True

# `[]` and `None` are not equivalent
print([] == None) # False

In Python, None is a special constant that indicates the absence of a value, while an empty list represents a list with no elements.

To highlight their distinctions, consider the following examples:

def foo():
  # this function implicitly returns `None`
  pass

result = foo()

print(result)  # None

In the code above, the function "foo()" does not explicitly return a value, so it implicitly returns None. In contrast, the creation of an empty list is denoted by square brackets ([]):

empty_list = []

print(empty_list)  # []

As you can see, an empty list does not have any elements. You can verify this by checking the length of the list by using the len() function:

list_size = len([])

print(list_size) # 0

That being said, the list can have one (or more) "None" elements, in which case, the size of the list will increase:

list_size = len([None])

print(list_size) # 1