Proposed new collection methods

[Christopher Subich]

Mike Meyer wrote:
> Another thread pointed out a couple of methods that would be nice to
> have on Python collections: find and inject. These are taken from
> <URL: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CollectionClosureMethod.html >.
> 
> find can be defined as:
> 
>      def find(self, test = None):
>          for item in self:
>              if test:
>                 if test(item):
>                    return item
>              elif item:
>                    return item
>          return ValueError, '%s.index(): no matching items in list' \
>                 % self.__class__.__name__

Dear Zeus no.  Find can be defined as:
def find(self, test=lambda x:1):
    try:
       item = (s for s in iter(self) if test(s)).next()
    except StopIteration:
       raise ValueError('No matching items in list')

Let's use generators, people. And given the simplicity of writing this, 
I'm not sure we need it in the standard library -- especially since the 
default test is arbitrary.  This recipe can also be useful for 
dictionaries, where the syntax would be slightly different, and 
lists-of-immutables, in which case returning the index in the list might 
be better.  Too much customization.

> inject is basically an OO version of reduce. You can define it in
> terms of reduce:

Except that if it's exactly reduce, we don't need to call it inject. 
The problem with reduce in python isn't that it's functional rather than 
OO, it's that it's limited to a function call or lambda -- one 
expression rather than an anonymous block.