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copied!<p>That's a very much a 'pure functional' approach and as such is a sensible idiom in Haskell but it's probably not so appropriate to Python. Python only has a very limited concept of <a href="http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/patterns.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">patterns</a> in this way - and I suspect you might need a somewhat more rigid type system to implement that sort of construct (<a href="http://www.erlang.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">erlang</a> buffs invited to disagree here).</p> <p>What you have is probably as close as you would get to that idiom, but you are probably better off using a list comprehension or imperative approach rather than recursively calling a function with the tail of the list. </p> <p>As has been <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/10/pythons_weak_functional_progra.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">stated</a> <a href="http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4550" rel="nofollow noreferrer">on a few occasions</a> <a href="http://blog.ianbicking.org/functional-python.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">before</a>, Python is not actually a functional language. It just borrows ideas from the FP world. It is not inherently <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_recursion" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Tail Recursive</a> in the way you would expect to see embedded in the architecture of a functional language, so you would have some difficulty doing this sort of recursive operation on a large data set without using a lot of stack space.</p>

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