list - Why does append() always return None in Python?

Question

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Answer 1

append is a mutating (destructive) operation (it modifies the list in place instead of of returning a new list). The idiomatic way to do the non-destructive equivalent of append would be

l = [1,2,3]
print l + [4] # [1,2,3,4]
print l # [1,2,3]

to answer your question, my guess is that if append returned the newly modified list, users might think that it was non-destructive, ie they might write code like

m = l.append("a")
n = l.append("b")

and expect n to be [1,2,3,"b"]