I think in Python 3 I'll be able to do:
first, *rest = l
which is exactly what I want, but I'm using 2.6. For now I'm doing:
first = l[0]
rest = l[1:]
This is fine, but I was just wondering if there's something more elegant.
first, rest = l[0], l[1:]
Basically the same, except that it's a oneliner. Tuple assigment rocks.
This is a bit longer and less obvious, but generalized for all iterables (instead of being restricted to sliceables):
i = iter(l)
first = next(i) # i.next() in older versions
rest = list(i)