itertools.islice and slice objects

[Raymond Hettinger]

[Steven Bethard]
> Is there a reason that itertools.islice doesn't support None arguments
> for start and step?  This would be handy for use with slice objects

Offhand, this seems like a reasonable idea.  Please file a Py2.5 feature request
and assign to me.


> Of course, I can get (start, stop, step) tuples with slice.indices, but
> only if I know the length of the iterable, which kinda defeats the
> purpose of using itertools...

The main purpose is to extract elements one at time instead of all at once.
This memory friendly approach results in better scalability.


Raymond Hettinger