itertools to iter transition (WAS: Pre-PEP: Dictionary accumulator methods)

[Steven Bethard]

Ville Vainio wrote:
> The issue that really bothers me here is bloating the builtin
> space. We already have an uncomfortable amount of builtin
> functions. Of course the additions that have been suggested would not
> pollute the builtin namespace, but they would still be there, taking
> space. I'd rather see a more modular and 'slimmer' Python, what with
> the advent of Python for S60 and other embedded uses.

Certainly a valid point.  How would you feel about adding just a select 
few itertools functions, perhaps just islice, chain and tee?  These 
functions provide the operations that exist for lists but don't, by 
default, exist for iterators: slicing, concatenation and copying.

STeVe