On Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 08:47:12AM -0700, David Mertz wrote:
Consuming the iterator is *necessary* to get the last item. There's no way around that.
Obviously, you could itertools.tee() it first if you don't mind the cache space. But there cannot be a generic "jump to the end" of an iterator without being destructive.
Right. But you're missing the point of Danilo's proposal. He isn't asking for a function to "jump to the end" of an iterator. Look at his example. The word "last" is a misnomer: he seems to me talking about having a special variable in comprehensions that holds the *previous* value of the loop variable, with special syntax to set its FIRST value, before the loop is entered. So "last" is a misleading name, unless you understand it as "last seen" rather than "very last, at the end". So given an iterator [1, 2, 4, 8], and an initial value of -1, we would see something like this: [(previous, this) for this in [1, 2, 4, 8] with previous as -1] # or some other syntax returns: [(-1, 1), (1, 2), (2, 4), (4, 8)] So a dedicated function that does nothing but scan to the end of the iterator and return the last/final value seen is no alternative to his proposal. -- Steve