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

Tal Einat taleinat at gmail.com
Tue Oct 12 21:41:00 CEST 2010

Paul Moore wrote:

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.runningmin = None  def feed(self, val):  if self.runningmin is None:  self.runningmin = val  else:  self.runningmin = min(self.runningmin, val)  def close(self):  pass rmin = Rmin() for val in iter:  rmin.feed(val) print rmin.runningmin

That's what I was thinking about too.

How about something along these lines? http://pastebin.com/DReBL56T

I just worked that up now and would like some comments and suggestions. It could either turn into a PEP or an external library, depending on popularity here.

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