[Python-Dev] Adding start to enumerate() (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue May 13 21:01:20 CEST 2008


On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

On Wed, 14 May 2008 12:25:01 am Guido van Rossum wrote:

> However I see no use for skipping items > from the start, You've never had to deal with data where the first N items were special in some way? e.g. skipping over a header line in a file?

Of course I have. But never in the argument to enumerate().

[...]

> and if that use case ever came up, passing a slice to > enumerate() would be the appropriate thing to do.

While slices are wonderfully useful things, they aren't panaceas. They're not so useful with iterators, and they make a copy of the data, which can be problematic if there's a lot of it.

That's why we have itertools.islice().

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)



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