> On Nov 3, 2016, at 3:51 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
>
> Before there can be a solution, there first has to be a problem that
> needs solving. "Lack of consistency" is not necessarily a problem. The
> intertools functions are quite different, they do different things with
> different APIs. The question here should not be "why don't these
> functions take None as an argument?", rather it should be "why should
> these functions take None as an argument?".
I concur with Steven who articulated the issue perfectly. There isn't an
actual problem here that needs to be solved (i.e. not a single user report in
15 years indicating that the API wasn't meeting the needs for real use-cases).
I'm disinclined to churn the API unless there is a real need.
FWIW, groupby() has the predicate as an optional argument so that you can write
groupby('aaabbc') and have it group by value (much like the key-function on
sorted() is optional). The two filter variants allow None as the first
argument only for historical reasons -- once "bool" came along, it would have
been better to write filter(bool, someiterable) in preference to using None
which is less clear about its intention. The takewhile/dropwhile tools didn't
have the same constraint to match a historical API, so there was an opportunity
to have a clearer API with a simpler signature.
As Terry suggested, if you have other itertools feature requests, please put
them on the tracker an assign them to me.
Thank you,
Raymond
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