map, filter, reduce, zip, range, and.. slice?

[Eyal Lotem]

Hey.  Recently, I've been heavily using functional-style programming in 
Python, doing almost all of my text processing and so with complex nested 
lambda clauses.  I love those, as they are so short, and seem to work with 
a painless "debug" cycle, usually consisting of some missing reduce initial 
value or so.

To get to the point, I've almost always lacked a 'slice' function, that 
slices sequences into smaller chunks.  For example:

divide("Hello world!", 2) => ["He", "ll", "o ", "wo", "rl", "d!"]

This can be useful to map() items or chunks inside sequences, rather than 
individual items. It can also be useful for for'ing through chunks of 
sequences.  I ended up re-coding this function everywhere I've got Python 
installed (which is a lot of places, that are not necessarily networked :).

I was wondering:

A) Is there an already existing way to do this in the standard library, via 
a function that does this exactly, or some similar functionality?

B) If not, will it be a good idea to incorporate such a function into the 
standard library?