Python has an ordered dictionary. What about an ordered set?
So i also had a small list where i clearly had the possibility of introducing non-unique values.
I searched for the existence of a unique list of some sort, but then realized that testing the existence of the element before adding it works just fine.
if(not new_element in my_list):
my_list.append(new_element)
I don't know if there are caveats to this simple approach, but it solves my problem.