On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 2:35 AM, Stefan Behnel<stefan_ml@behnel.de> wrote:
I just had a discussion with a co-worker, and we noticed that there are use cases where you just want the only element in a data structure, or just any of the elements in a data structure because you know that they all contain the same information (with respect to what you are looking for, at least).
If you want all items, you can iterate, but if you just want any item or the only item, it's inefficient (and not very explicit code) to create an iterator and take the element out.
I assure you it's not slow. next(iter(x)) is probably as good as it gets -- I don't think we need another way to say that in fewer words. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)