On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 4:50 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
Of course, I'm arguing theoretically here. I've never even used itertools.combinations, so I have no real need for *any* of this. If people who do use this sort of thing on a regular basis have other opinions, then that's a much stronger argument :-)
In practice, you'll be doing prefiltering and other conditioning on your combinations to weed out nonsensical variants cheaply, or your combinations will be coming from a database query or map reduce result. So I personally think it's the kind of thing that comes up in toy programming exercises and various academic explorations rather than something that solves a significant practical need. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia