[Raymond Hettinger]
> [Armin Rigo]
> > BTW the reason I'm looking at this is that I'm considering adding
> > another undocumented internal-use-only method, maybe __getitem_cue__(),
> > that would try to guess what the nth item to be returned will be.  This
> > would allow the repr of some iterators to display more helpful
> > information when playing around with them at the prompt, e.g.:
> >
> >>>> enumerate([3.1, 3.14, 3.141, 3.1415, 3.14159, 3.141596])
> > <enumerate (0, 3.1), (1, 3.14), (2, 3.141),... length 6>
> 
> At one point, I explored and then abandoned this idea.  For objects like 
> itertools.count(n), it worked fine -- the state was readily knowable and the 
> eval(repr(obj)) round-trip was possible.  However, for tools like 
> enumerate(), it didn't make sense to have a preview that only applied in a 
> tiny handful of (mostly academic) cases and was not evaluable in any case.
> 

That is my experience too.  Even for knowable sequences people consume
it in series and not just one element.  My permutation module supports 
pulling out just the Nth canonical permutation.  Lots of people have
used the module and no one uses that feature.

>>> import probstat
>>> p = probstat.Permutation(range(4))
>>> p[0]
[0, 1, 2, 3]
>>> len(p)
24
>>> p[23]
[3, 2, 1, 0]
>>> 

-jackdied
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