Python's semantics make homogeneity less useful and hard to enforce. Everything's passed by reference, so the list has to contain pointers even if you know all

Python's semantics make homogeneity less useful and hard to enforce. Everything's passed by reference, so the list has to contain pointers even if you know all its elements have the same type. And some objects can change their type by assigning to __class__, which can happen from a distance (because everything is by reference). A careful implementation can solve this for some builtin types. PyPy does it for ints: if a list only contains ints it's represented as a proper numeric array. But then as soon as you append some other type the whole list is converted to a more expensive more traditional representation. PyPy's ints still have to pretend to be heap-allocated objects at all times. In particular they have to do something tricky with the id() function, which on CPython just returns an object's memory address. The return value has to be unique and consistent for as long as an object lives.