[Python-Dev] Allowing slicing of iterators

[Steven Bethard]

Raymond Hettinger <python at rcn.com> wrote:
> 
> FWIW, someone (Bengt Richter perhaps) once suggested syntactic support
> differentiated from sequences but less awkward than a call to
> itertools.islice().
> 
> itertools.islice(someseq, lo, hi) would be rendered as someseq'[lo:hi].

Just to make sure I'm reading this right, the difference between
sequence slicing and iterator slicing is a single-quote?  IMVHO,
that's pretty hard to read...

If we're really looking for a builtin, wouldn't it be better to go the
route of getattr/setattr and have something like getslice that could
operate on both lists and iterators?  Then
    getslice(lst, lo, hi)
would just be an alias for
    lst[lo:hi]
and
    getslice(itr, lo, hi)
would just be an alias for
    itertools.islice(itr, lo, hi)

Steve
-- 
You can wordify anything if you just verb it.
        --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy