[Tutor] Python Idioms?

[Mark Lawrence]

On 01/04/2015 11:50, Alan Gauld wrote:
> On 01/04/15 11:04, Wolfgang Maier wrote:
>> On 04/01/2015 11:04 AM, Alan Gauld wrote:
>>> On 01/04/15 05:50, Jim Mooney wrote:
>>>
>>>>>>> s = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
>>>>>>> list(zip(*[iter(s)]*2))
>>>>>>> [(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6), (7, 8)]
>>>
>>> Personally I'd have used slicing in this example:
>>>
>>> zip(s[::2],s[1::2])
>>>
>>
>> With an emphasis on *in this example*.
>>
>> The idiom you are citing works on any iterable, not all of which support
>> slicing and the slicing version requires two passes over the data.
>
> Agreed, but readability always trumps performance,
> unless performance is critical.
> In which case readability usually trumps performance.
>
> And especially on a beginners list.
>

In which case I'll stick with the more-itertools pairwise() function 
which I pointed out on another thread just yesterday.  From 
http://pythonhosted.org//more-itertools/api.html

<quote>
Returns an iterator of paired items, overlapping, from the original

 >>> take(4, pairwise(count()))
[(0, 1), (1, 2), (2, 3), (3, 4)]
</quote>

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence