Question

Given two lists of equal length, is there a simpler or preferred way to iterate over two lists of equal length and append the maximum of each pair of elements to a new list? These are the two methods I know of.

import itertools

a = [1,2,3,4,5]
b = [1,1,6,3,8]
m1 = list()
m2 = list()

for x, y in zip(a, b):
    m1.append(max(x, y))

for x in itertools.imap(max, a, b):
    m2.append(x)

Both of these result in [1, 2, 6, 4, 8], which is correct. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

map(max, a, b)
[max(x, y) for x, y in zip(a, b)]