What is `last(inf_iter)`. E.g `last(count())`.

To me, the obvious spelling is:

    for last in it: pass
    doSomething(last)

This makes it clear that is the users job to make sure `it` terminates. There's no general way to get the last item without looking through all the earlier ones.


On Oct 23, 2016 7:58 AM, "Danilo J. S. Bellini" <danilo.bellini@gmail.com> wrote:
The idea is to let generator expressions and list/set comprehensions have a clean syntax to access its last output. That would allow them to be an alternative syntax to the scan higher-order function [1] (today implemented in the itertools.accumulate function), which leads to an alternative way to write a fold/reduce. It would be nice to have something like:

>>> last(abs(prev - x) for x in [3, 4, 5] from prev = 2)
2

instead of a reduce:

>>> from functools import reduce
>>> reduce(lambda prev, x: abs(prev - x), [3, 4, 5], 2)
2

or an imperative approach:

>>> prev = 2
>>> for x in [3, 4, 5]:
...     prev = abs(prev - x)
>>> prev
2

or getting the last from accumulate:

>>> from itertools import accumulate
>>> list(accumulate([2, 3, 4, 5], lambda prev, x: abs(prev - x)))[-1]
2

or...

>>> [prev for prev in [2]
...       for x in [3, 4, 5]
...       for prev in [abs(prev - x)]
... ][-1]
2

Actually, I already wrote a solution for something similar to that: PyScanPrev [2]. I'm using bytecode manipulation to modify the generator expression and set/list comprehensions semantics to create a "scan", but it has the limitation of using only code with a valid syntax as the input, so I can't use "from" inside a generator expression / list comprehension. The solution was to put the first output into the iterable and define the "prev" name elsewhere:

>>> last(abs(prev - x) for x in [2, 3, 4, 5])
2

That line works with PyScanPrev (on Python 3.4 and 3.5) when defined in a function with a @enable_scan("prev") decorator. That was enough to create a "test suite" of doctest-based examples that shows several scan use cases [2].

This discussion started in a Brazilian list when someone asked how she could solve a simple uppercase/lowercase problem [3]. The goal was to alternate the upper/lower case of a string while neglecting the chars that doesn't apply (i.e., to "keep the state" when the char isn't a letter). After the discussion, I wrote the PyScanPrev package, and recently I've added this historical "alternate" function as the "conditional toggling" example [4].

Then I ask, can Python include that "scan" access to the last output in its list/set/dict comprehension and generator expression syntax? There are several possible applications for the scan itself as well as for the fold/reduce (signal processing, control theory, physics, economics, etc.), some of them I included as PyScanPrev examples. Some friends (people who like control engineering and/or signal processing) liked the "State-space model" example, where I included a "leaking bucket-spring-damper" simulation using the scan-enabled generator expressions [5].

About the syntax, there are several ideas on how that can be written. Given a "prev" identifier, a "target" identifier, an input "iterable" and an optional "start" value (and perhaps an optional "echo_start", which I assume True by default), some of them are:

[func(prev, target) for target in iterable from prev = start]
[func(prev, target) for target in iterable] -> prev = start
[func(prev, target) for target in iterable] -> prev as start
[func(prev, target) for target in iterable] from prev = start
[func(prev, target) for target in iterable] from prev as start
[func(prev, target) for target in iterable] with prev as start
prev = start -> [func(prev, target) for target in iterable]
prev(start) -> [func(prev, target) for target in iterable]
[func(prev, target) for prev -> target in start -> iterable]
[prev = start -> func(prev, target) for target in iterable]

# With ``start`` being the first value of the iterable, i.e.,
#   iterable = prepend(start, data)
[func(prev, target) for target in iterable from prev]
[func(prev, target) for target in iterable] -> prev
[func(prev, target) for target in iterable] from prev
prev -> [func(prev, target) for target in iterable]

Before writing PyScanPrev, in [6] (Brazilian Portuguese) I used stackfull [7] to implement that idea, an accumulator example using that library is:

>>> from stackfull import push, pop, stack
>>> [push(pop() + el if stack() else el) for el in range(5)]
[0, 1, 3, 6, 10]
>>> list(itertools.accumulate(range(5)))
[0, 1, 3, 6, 10]

There are more I can say (e.g. the pyscanprev.scan function has a "start" value and an "echo_start" keyword argument, resources I missed in itertools.accumulate) but the links below already have a lot of information.

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