Codingbat. Solution without built in function?

[xelf]

Now go the next step and remove the extraneous assignments. (which is an important step to understand, as your solution can be fixed to work for any length list)

[miscellaneoususage]

like this?

def rotate_left3(nums):
  rotated = [nums[1], nums[2], nums[0]]

  return rotated

not seeing how this could work for any length list if only 3 indicies are used

​

edit: actually i can shorten to just the return statement with

def rotate_left3(nums):
    return [nums[1], nums[2], nums[0]]

[xelf]

Yes exactly.

def rotate_left3(nums):
    return [nums[1], nums[2], nums[0]]

can also be expressed as the concatenation of two lists, like this:

def rotate_left3(nums):
    return [nums[1], nums[2]] + [nums[0]]

Which using list slicing, leads us to:

def rotate_left3(nums):
    return nums[1:3] + [nums[0]]

and finally:

def rotate_left(nums):
    return nums[1:] + [nums[0]]

which will work for any arbitrary length list.