Final state of underlying sequence in islice

[Terry Reedy]

On 11/5/2010 4:58 AM, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>>   Shashank Singh<shashank.sunny.si... at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> Are there any promises made with regard to final state of the underlying
>>> sequence that islice slices?
>
> Currently, there are no promises or guarantees about the final state
> of the iterator.

I interpret the current doc statement as a promise that becomes 
ambiguous when step > 1.

> To the extent the pure Python version in the docs differs from the
> CPython implementation in this regard, it is an accidental
> implementation detail.
>
> That being said, we could introduce some guarantees (earliest possible
> stop point, latest possible stop point, or decide to leave it
> undefined).

In between earliest and latest, depending on the stop value, is another 
possibility. If it is relatively easy to patch the C version to match 
the Python version (earliest stop point) I would go for that. It is easy 
to skip over and ignore more items, impossible to go back.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy