f python?

[Terry Reedy]

On 4/10/2012 4:10 PM, Rainer Weikusat wrote:

> 'car' and 'cdr' refer to cons cells in Lisp, not to strings. How the
> first/rest terminology can be sensibly applied to 'C strings' (which
> are similar to linked-lists in the sense that there's a 'special
> termination value' instead of an explicit length) was already
> explained elsewhere.

The idea of partitioning a collection into one item and the rest can be 
applied to any collection (or subcollection). Python iterators embody 
this generic idea. An iterator represents a collection (or 
subcollection). Built-in next(iter) either returns an item while 
updating iter to represent the subcollection without the item, or raises 
StopIteration. *How* to test emptiness, 'remove' an item, and mutate the 
iterator are all implementation details hidden inside the iterator. They 
are mostly irrelevant to the abstract operation of repeated partitioning 
to process each item of a collection.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy