On 6 January 2015 at 18:36, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Jan 2015 18:22:44 +0000
> Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 6 January 2015 at 17:14, Raymond Hettinger
>> <raymond.hettinger@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> On Jan 6, 2015, at 8:22 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> In writing a utility script today, I found myself needing to do
>> >> something similar to what the Unix "comm" utility does - take two
>> >> sorted iterators, and partition the values into "only in the first",
>> >> "only in the second", and "in both" groups.
>> >
>> > As far as I can tell, this would be a very rare need.
>>
>> It's come up for me a few times, usually when trying to check two
>> lists of files to see which ones have been missed by a program, and
>> which ones the program thinks are present but no longer exist.
>
> Why don't you use sets for such things? Your iterator is really only
> useful for huge or unhashable inputs.

For the case described you're right. I had a case the other day where
one of the problems was that one list had duplicates, and I needed to
see that ([1,1,2,2] vs [1,2] needed to show [1,2] as "only in the
first list" and [1,2] as "in both"). I could probably have used
counters. But I was starting from thinking that I had a pair of sorted
lists, and "in the Unix shell I'd use comm"...)

Paul

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