</pre>
<font color="black">The slice operator creates a new list and the assignment
makes <tt>t</tt> refer to it, but none of that has any effect
on the list that was passed as an argument.<br />
<br />
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<br />
An alternative is to write a function that creates and
returns a new list. For
example, <tt>tail</tt> returns all but the first
element of a list:
</font><pre><font size="4" color="blue">
def tail(t):
    return t[1:]
</font></pre><font color