I don't see any problem with using "list" to refer to any data structure that is functionally equivalent to a list, regardless of implementation. This is hardly unique to Python: Mathematica's List type (despite the Lisp heritage) is also really an array.<p>You could easily imagine the implementation being changed to something else (say a VList or unrolled linked list) if someone did some benchmarking and it turned out that it made Python programs 5% faster on average. Then the name "array" would no longer be accurate, and neither would "list" in the narrow, pedantic sense. So using the term "list" in a more abstract sense is perfectly reasonable.<p>The term "list" also has some (tiny) advantages: it's shorter than "array" or "vector", and it's one less technical term for people learning programming (as I understand, this was one of Guido's design goals).<p>If we're going to talk about inaccurately named data types, let's start with the ubiquitous use of "integer" to refer to bastardized integers modulo 2^32...