On 6 October 2016 at 14:45, Filipp Bakanov <filipp@bakanov.su> wrote:
For now there are many usefull builtin functions like "any", "all", etc. I'd like to propose a new builtin function "equal". It should accept iterable, and return True if all items in iterable are the same or iterable is emty. That's quite popular problem, there is a discussion of how to perform it on stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3844801/check-if-all-elements-in-a-list-a...) - all suggestions are either slow or not very elegant. What do you think about it?
It's not a problem I've needed to solve often, if at all (in real-world code). But even if we assume it is worth having as a builtin, what would you propose as the implementation? The stackoverflow discussion highlights a lot of approaches, all with their own trade-offs. One problem with a builtin is that it would have to work on all iterables, which is likely to preclude a number of the faster solutions (which rely on the argument being an actual list). It's an interesting optimisation problem, and the discussion gives some great insight into how to micro-optimise an operation like this, but I'd question whether it needs to be a language/stdlib feature. Paul