switch recipe?

[Alex Martelli]

On Saturday 13 July 2002 00:11, Mark McEahern wrote:
	...
> In general, this recipe, if it's worthy to be called such, is useful when
> you want to weave together a finite set of values of a given length (n)
> with a different set of values of a different length (m) and for the i-th
> element of n, you want it to be weaved with the len(m) modulo i-th
> element of m.

Right.  So what about a direct implementation of what you just said?

def weave(setn, setm):
    n = len(setn)
    m = len(setm)
    if not n or not m:
        raise ValueError, "Weaved sets cannot be empty"
    yield setn[0], setm[0]
    i = 1
    while i%n or i%m:
        yield setn[i%n], setm[i%m]
        i += 1

Your approach is more clever (and may have other uses), but this
plain and direct implementation appeals to me.  So the function
that uses it might become something like:

def colorize(value, *colors):
    return ''.join([ "<%s>%s</%s>" % (color, item, color)
                          for item, color in weave(value, colors) ])


Alex