Arrays in Python give you a huge amount of flexibility for storing, organizing, and accessing data. This is crucial, not least because of Python’s popularity for use in data science.

How NumPy speeds array math in Python. A big part of NumPy’s speed comes from using machine-native datatypes, instead of Python’s object types.

If you just use plain python, there is no array. Both the visual module and the pylab module load numpy. And you can still index the array as you would a list. Here is an example.