Do The Right Thing

I love it when a programming language behaves in an unsurprising and helpful way. This is Python in a nutshell.

Consider the following situation I came across yesterday. I needed to pair off two lists. Naturally, Python has a built-in function for this:

x = [1, 2, 3]
y = ['a', 'b', 'c']
zip(x, y)
# [(1, 'a'), (2, 'b'), (3, 'c')]

But what happens if the lists are different lengths (as they were in my case)? Python does the logical thing, and stops with the shorter list:

x = [1, 2, 3]
y = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
zip(x, y)
# [(1, 'a'), (2, 'b'), (3, 'c')]

This is exactly the behavior I needed, no special case handling required. Woot!