Most of that is wrong.
- The list abstract data type is an ordered sequence of elements, allowing duplicates. There are many ways to implement this data type, particularly as a linked list, but most programming languages use dynamically resized arrays.
- Even linked lists may support indexing. There is no way for the implementation to skip directly to the n'th element, but it can just follow links to get there.
- Java's List type does not specify an implementation, only an interface. The ArrayList type is a List implemented with a dynamic array; the Linkedlist is exactly what the name says.
- Python's lists are implemented with dynamically resized arrays. Python's tuples are implemented with fixed-size arrays.
- There are actually two Python types commonly referred to as arrays, not counting the common newbie usage of "array" to refer to Python lists. There are the arrays provided by the
array
module, and there are NumPy'sndarray
s. - When you index an array, the implementation does not iterate from the location of the first element to the n'th. It adds an offset to the address of the array to skip to the element directly, without iterating.