You can use "+" for returning extend, instead of extending in place.
l1=range(10) l1+[11] [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11] l2=range(10,1,-1) l1+l2 [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2] Similarly += for in place behavior, but with slight differences from append & extend. One of the biggest differences of += from append and extend is when it is used in function scopes, see this blog post: