On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 1:01 PM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Jun 2022 at 05:32, Mike Miller <python-id...@mgmiller.net> > wrote: > > > > My first thought was next(), which I use occasionally: > > > > It's fine for exactly two elements, where you'll never need to adjust > the code to want three, and where you know already that this is an > iterator (not some other iterable). If you had five elements to > unpack, it would be quite clunky, and even more so if you wanted to > change the precise number of elements unpacked, as you'd have to match > the number of next calls. > What if next grew a new argument? Changing the signature of a builtin is a big change, but surely not bigger than new syntax? If we could ask for the number of items returned the original example might look like >>> first, second = next(iter(items), count=2) I don’t think anyone who has started to learn python would be confused by this. And this new arg could be combined with the existing default to avoid possible exceptions. >>> spam, eggs, cheese = next(range(1), 9, count=3) >>> spam, eggs, cheese … 0, 9, 9 I guess this is starting to look like the islice solution, but now it’s magically in the builtin namespace. I don’t recall ever using islice myself, but I would believe the one argument form to be the most commonly used.
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