For example, if I have the following (data from Project Euler): s = [[75], [95, 64], [17, 47, 82], [18, 35, 87, 10], [20, 4, 82, 47, 65], [19, 1, 23, 75, 3, 34], [88, 2, 77, 73, 7, 63, 67], [99, 65, 4, 28, 6, 16, 70, 92], [41, 41, 26, 56, 83, 40, 80, 70, 33], [41, 48, 72, 33, 47, 32, 37, 16, 94, 29], [53, 71, 44, 65, 25, 43, 91, 52, 97, 51, 14], [70, 11, 33, 28, 77, 73, 17, 78, 39, 68, 17, 57], [91, 71, 52, 38, 17, 14, 91, 43, 58, 50, 27, 29, 48], [63, 66, 4, 68,89, 53, 67, 30, 73, 16, 69, 87, 40, 31], [4, 62, 98, 27, 23, 9, 70, 98, 73, 93, 38, 53, 60, 4, 23]] Why does s[1:][:-1] give me the same thing as s[1:] instead of (what I want) [s[i][:-1] for i in range(1,len(s))]. In other words, why does Python ignore my second index?