Abstract
The module itertools provides 20 tools.
There's 19 iterables and then there's tee...
But what does tee do and why is it the only thing in the module itertools that's not an iterable?
In this talk you will understand what tee does and when to use it, but most importantly, you will understand the paradox behind tee...
See, the thing is that tee seems to go against the laws of iterators...
Outline
- Iterables vs iterators (5'): a brief overview of the difference between iterables and iterators, as well as showing how iterators can only be traversed once.
- What does tee do? (10'): this section will show what tee does, including a live-coded demonstration through two examples; one that is purely mechanical to show that tee splits the given iterator into n iterators and one that is closer to a real-world usage of tee, using tee to implement pairwise.
- The solution to the paradox (10'): if iterators can only be traversed once, how is it that tee allows you to create n copies of the given iterator? This section will provide a possible solution to the paradox by live coding a pure-Python implementation of tee that is fully working and that can be tested against the two examples of the previous section.
Talk notebook
The notebook that was live-coded during the session can be downloaded from GitHub.
