On 14/12/2013 19:42, Peter Otten wrote:
Mark Lawrence wrote:
This method returns a list, the example from The Fine Docs being:-
>>> Counter('abracadabra').most_common(3)
[('a', 5), ('r', 2), ('b', 2)]
With the trend in Python being more and more towards methods returning
iterators, is there ever likely to be an imost_common method, or has
this been suggested and rejected, or what? I'm really just curious, but
if enough people were to express an interest and it hasn't already been
done, I'd happily raise an enhancement request on the bug tracker.
As Counter is currently a dict you have to look at all items to find the
most common. With that underlying data structure I don't see how it could
make sense to yield the most common items incrementally. So
(1) When would you prefer it over the the eager variant?
(2) How would you implement it?
By the way, if you can come up with a plausible answer for the second
question you should aim higher, for lazy heapq.nlargest() and sorted()
functions...
Coming from my No. 1 MVP (Most Valuable Pythonista) I'll take that as an
emphatic no :)
The good news from my POV is that while thinking about this, then
looking at my code, I completely eliminated an unneeded data structure.
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
