[Python-ideas] [Python-Dev] minmax() function returning (minimum, maximum) tuple of a sequence (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Tue Oct 12 17:51:03 CEST 2010

On 11 October 2010 21:18, Tal Einat <taleinat at gmail.com> wrote:

We recently needed exactly this -- to do several running calculations in parallel on an iterable. We avoided using co-routines and just created a RunningCalc class with a simple interface, and implemented various running calculations as sub-classes, e.g. min, max, average, variance, n-largest. This isn't very fast, but since generating the iterated values is computationally heavy, this is fast enough for our uses.

Having a standard method to do this in Python, with implementations for common calculations in the stdlib, would have been nice. I wouldn't mind trying to work up a PEP for this, if there is support for the idea.

The "consumer" interface as described in http://effbot.org/zone/consumer.htm sounds about right for this:

class Rmin(object): def init(self): self.running_min = None def feed(self, val): if self.running_min is None: self.running_min = val else: self.running_min = min(self.running_min, val) def close(self): pass

rmin = Rmin() for val in iter: rmin.feed(val) print rmin.running_min

Paul.

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