Initializing a list to a known number of elements in Python

The first thing that comes to mind for me is:

verts = [None]*1000

But do you really need to preinitialize it?

Not quite sure why everyone is giving you a hard time for wanting to do this - there are several scenarios where you'd want a fixed size initialised list. And you've correctly deduced that arrays are sensible in these cases.

import array
verts=array.array('i',(0,)*1000)

For the non-pythonistas, the (0,)*1000 term is creating a tuple containing 1000 zeros. The comma forces python to recognise (0) as a tuple, otherwise it would be evaluated as 0.

I've used a tuple instead of a list because they are generally have lower overhead.

One obvious and probably not efficient way is

verts = [0 for x in range(1000)]

Note that this can be extended to 2-dimension easily. For example, to get a 10x100 "array" you can do

verts = [[0 for x in range(100)] for y in range(10)]

Wanting to initalize an array of fixed size is a perfectly acceptable thing to do in any programming language; it isn't like the programmer wants to put a break statement in a while(true) loop. Believe me, especially if the elements are just going to be overwritten and not merely added/subtracted, like is the case of many dynamic programming algorithms, you don't want to mess around with append statements and checking if the element hasn't been initialized yet on the fly (that's a lot of code gents).

object = [0 for x in range(1000)]

This will work for what the programmer is trying to achieve.