I wouldn't call it insane, neither brilliant. I use this function to split a sequence into pairs (or triplets, or fourths, etc): def paired(t, size=2, defaul

I wouldn't call it insane, neither brilliant. I use this function to split a sequence into pairs (or triplets, or fourths, etc): def paired(t, size=2, default=None): it = iter(t) return itertools.izip_longest(*[it]*size, fillvalue=default) I use it in a formatter which outputs alphabetized data in columns, where the order should run down the columns instead rowwise.