[Python-Dev] Allowing slicing of iterators (original) (raw)

Raymond Hettinger python at rcn.com
Tue Jan 25 22:05:37 CET 2005

Iterators are for single sequential access. It's a feature that you have to import itertools (or at least that you have to invoke its special operations) -- iterators are not sequences and shouldn't be confused with such.

FWIW, someone (Bengt Richter perhaps) once suggested syntactic support differentiated from sequences but less awkward than a call to itertools.islice().

itertools.islice(someseq, lo, hi) would be rendered as someseq'[lo:hi].

Raymond

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