[Python-Dev] Half-baked proposal: * (and **?) in assignments

[Brett Cannon]

[Oren Tirosh]

> I like this function, but the argument name is misleading - it isn't
> necessarily an iterator. In the common use cases it will be a list or
> tuple.
>
> def peel(iterable, arg_cnt=2):
>     iterator = iter(iterable)
>     for num in xrange(arg_cnt):
>         yield iterator.next()
>     yield iterator
>
> The name 'iterable' is unambigous but a little awkward. I'd like to
> use the term 'sequence' but I'm afraid people already associate it
> with the built-in sequence types or with something indexable rather
> than iterable. Do you think of iterators as a sequences?
>

I know I think of them as a lazy sequence.  But you are right, people tend
to associate sequence with either lists or tuples, perhaps because you can
do indexing on them.

-Brett