It seems so "dirty" emptying a list in this way:
while len(alist) > 0 : alist.pop()
Does a clear way exist to do that?
Answer
This actually removes the contents from the list, but doesn't replace the old label with a new empty list:
del lst[:]
Here's an example:
lst1 = [1, 2, 3]
lst2 = lst1
del lst1[:]
print(lst2)
For the sake of completeness, the slice assignment has the same effect:
lst[:] = []
It can also be used to shrink a part of the list while replacing a part at the same time (but that is out of the scope of the question).
Note that doing lst = [] does not empty the list, just creates a new object and binds it to the variable lst, but the old list will still have the same elements, and effect will be apparent if it had other variable bindings.