[Tutor] Python Idioms?

[Wolfgang Maier]

On 04/01/2015 11:04 AM, Alan Gauld wrote:
> On 01/04/15 05:50, Jim Mooney wrote:
>
>>>>> s = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
>>>>> list(zip(*[iter(s)]*2))
>>>>> [(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6), (7, 8)]
>
> Personally I'd have used slicing in this example:
>
> zip(s[::2],s[1::2])
>

With an emphasis on *in this example*.

The idiom you are citing works on any iterable, not all of which support 
slicing and the slicing version requires two passes over the data.