Raymond Hettinger wrote: > I'm considering deprecating these two functions and would like some > feedback from the community or from people who have a background in > functional programming. > > * I'm concerned that use cases for the two functions are uncommon and > can obscure code rather than clarify it. > > * I originally added them to itertools because they were found in > other functional languages and because it seemed like they would serve > basic building blocks in combination with other itertools allow > construction of a variety of powerful, high-speed iterators. The > latter may have been a false hope -- to date, I've not seen good > recipes that depend on either function. > > * If an always true or always false predicate is given, it can be hard > to break-out of the function once it is running. > > * Both functions seem simple and basic until you try to explain them > to someone else. Likewise, when reading code containing dropwhile(), > I don't think it is self-evident that dropwhile() may have a lengthy > start-up time. > > * Since itertools are meant to be combined together, the whole module > becomes easier to use if there are fewer tools to choose from. > > These thoughts reflect my own experience with the itertools module. > It may be that your experience with them has been different. Please > let me know what you think. > > Raymond
FWIW, Google Code Search shows a few users: <http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=lang%3Apython+%28drop%7Ctake%29while> Do any of them make good use of them? -- -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list