Mutability

Some objects in Python, such as lists and dictionaries, are mutable, meaning that their contents or state can be changed. Other objects, such as numeric types, tuples, and strings, are immutable, meaning they cannot be changed once they are created.

Let's imagine you order a mushroom and cheese pizza from La Val's, and they represent your order as a list:

>>> pizza = ['cheese', 'mushrooms']

With list mutation, they can update your order by mutate pizza directly rather than having to create a new list:

>>> pizza.append('onions')
>>> pizza
['cheese', 'mushrooms', 'onions']

Aside from append, there are various other list mutation methods:

• append(el): Add el to the end of the list. Return None.
• extend(lst): Extend the list by concatenating it with lst. Return None.
• insert(i, el): Insert el at index i. This does not replace any existing elements, but only adds the new element el. Return None.
• remove(el): Remove the first occurrence of el in list. Errors if el is not in the list. Return None otherwise.
• pop(i): Remove and return the element at index i.

We can also use list indexing with an assignment statement to change an existing element in a list. For example:

>>> pizza[1] = 'tomatoes'
>>> pizza
['cheese', 'tomatoes', 'onions']

Iterators

An iterable is any object that can be iterated through, or gone through one element at a time. One construct that we've used to iterate through an iterable is a for loop:

for elem in iterable:
    # do something

for loops work on any object that is iterable. We previously described it as working with any sequence -- all sequences are iterable, but there are other objects that are also iterable! We define an iterable as an object on which calling the built-in iter function returns an iterator. An iterator is another type of object that allows us to iterate through an iterable by keeping track of which element is next in the sequence.

To illustrate this, consider the following block of code, which does the exact same thing as the for statement above:

iterator = iter(iterable)
try:
    while True:
        elem = next(iterator)
        # do something
except StopIteration:
    pass

Here's a breakdown of what's happening:

• First, the built-in iter function is called on the iterable to create a corresponding iterator.
• To get the next element in the sequence, the built-in next function is called on this iterator.
• When next is called but there are no elements left in the iterator, a StopIteration error is raised. In the for loop construct, this exception is caught and execution can continue.

Calling iter on an iterable multiple times returns a new iterator each time with distinct states (otherwise, you'd never be able to iterate through a iterable more than once). You can also call iter on the iterator itself, which will just return the same iterator without changing its state. However, note that you cannot call next directly on an iterable.

Let's see the iter and next functions in action with an iterable we're already familiar with -- a list.

>>> lst = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> next(lst)             # Calling next on an iterable
TypeError: 'list' object is not an iterator
>>> list_iter = iter(lst) # Creates an iterator for the list
>>> list_iter
<list_iterator object ...>
>>> next(list_iter)       # Calling next on an iterator
1
>>> next(list_iter)       # Calling next on the same iterator
2
>>> next(iter(list_iter)) # Calling iter on an iterator returns itself
3
>>> list_iter2 = iter(lst)
>>> next(list_iter2)      # Second iterator has new state
1
>>> next(list_iter)       # First iterator is unaffected by second iterator
4
>>> next(list_iter)       # No elements left!
StopIteration
>>> lst                   # Original iterable is unaffected
[1, 2, 3, 4]

Since you can call iter on iterators, this tells us that that they are also iterables! Note that while all iterators are iterables, the converse is not true - that is, not all iterables are iterators. You can use iterators wherever you can use iterables, but note that since iterators keep their state, they're only good to iterate through an iterable once:

>>> list_iter = iter([4, 3, 2, 1])
>>> for e in list_iter:
...     print(e)
4
3
2
1
>>> for e in list_iter:
...     print(e)

Analogy: An iterable is like a book (one can flip through the pages) and an iterator for a book would be a bookmark (saves the position and can locate the next page). Calling iter on a book gives you a new bookmark independent of other bookmarks, but calling iter on a bookmark gives you the bookmark itself, without changing its position at all. Calling next on the bookmark moves it to the next page, but does not change the pages in the book. Calling next on the book wouldn't make sense semantically. We can also have multiple bookmarks, all independent of each other.

Iterable Uses

We know that lists are one type of built-in iterable objects. You may have also encountered the range(start, end) function, which creates an iterable of ascending integers from start (inclusive) to end (exclusive).

>>> for x in range(2, 6):
...     print(x)
...
2
3
4
5

Ranges are useful for many things, including performing some operations for a particular number of iterations or iterating through the indices of a list.

There are also some built-in functions that take in iterables and return useful results:

• map(f, iterable) - Creates an iterator over f(x) for x in iterable. In some cases, computing a list of the values in this iterable will give us the same result as [func(x) for x in iterable]. However, it's important to keep in mind that iterators can potentially have infinite values because they are evaluated lazily, while lists cannot have infinite elements.
• filter(f, iterable) - Creates an iterator over x for each x in iterable if f(x)
• zip(iterables*) - Creates an iterator over co-indexed tuples with elements from each of the iterables
• reversed(iterable) - Creates an iterator over all the elements in the input iterable in reverse order
• list(iterable) - Creates a list containing all the elements in the input iterable
• tuple(iterable) - Creates a tuple containing all the elements in the input iterable
• sorted(iterable) - Creates a sorted list containing all the elements in the input iterable
• reduce(f, iterable) - Must be imported with functools. Apply function of two arguments f cumulatively to the items of iterable, from left to right, so as to reduce the sequence to a single value.

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