On May 9, 2020, at 12:38, Christopher Barker <python...@gmail.com> wrote: > > https://github.com/PythonCHB/islice-pep/blob/master/pep-xxx-islice.rst
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but one thing immediately jumped out at me: > and methods on containers, such as dict.keys return iterators in Python 3, No they don’t. They return views—objects that are collections in their own right (in particular, they’re not one-shot; they can be iterated over and over) but just delegate to another object rather than storing the data. People also commonly say that range is an iterator instead of a function that returns a list in Python 3, and that’s wrong for the same reason. And this is important here, because a view is what you ideally _want_. The reason range, key view, etc. are views rather than iterators isn’t that it’s easier to implement or explain or anything, it’s that it’s a little harder to implement and explain but so much more useful that it’s worth it. It’s something people take advantage of all the time in real code. And this is pretty easy to implement. I have a quick and dirty version at https://github.com/abarnert/slices, but I think I may have a better version somewhere with more unit tests. For prior art specifically on slicing as a view, rather than just views in general, see memoryview (which only works on buffers, not all sequences) and NumPy (which is weird in many ways, but people rely on slicing giving you a storage-sharing view) The reason I never proposed this for the stdlib (even though that would allow adding methods directly onto the builtin container types, as your proposal does) is that I always want to build a _complete_ view library, with replacements for map, zip, enumerate, all of itertools, etc., and with enough cleverness to present exactly as much functionality as is possible. But just replacing islice is a much simpler task (mainly because the input has to be a sequence and the output is always a sequence, so the only complexity that arises is whether you want to allow mutable views into mutable sequences), and it may well be useful on its own.
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