I would like to make three small improvements to the "heapq" module.

1) The "nsmallest" function has the following code (a similar code exists in the "nlargest" function):

    # When n>=size, it's faster to use sorted()
    try:
        size = len(iterable)
    except (TypeError, AttributeError):
        pass
    else:
        if n >= size:
            return sorted(iterable, key=key)[:n]

   I think "[:n]" is redundant, because "iterable" contains no more than n elements.
   Therefore, that code can be rewritten as follows:
   
    # When n>=size, it's faster to use sorted()
    try:
        size = len(iterable)
    except (TypeError, AttributeError):
        pass
    else:
        if n >= size:
            return sorted(iterable, key=key)

2) It seems to me that the line:

    for i in reversed(range(n//2)):

   will be more optimal in this version:

    for i in range(n//2 + 1, -1, -1):


3) Top-level functions can be surrounded with two blank lines for greater compliance with PEP-8.

Sorry, I don't consider any of these changes to be improvements and some make the code worse in some ways, overriding intentional coding decisions.

Additional notes:  

* reversed() is preferred over the range(n-1, -1, -1) style both for clarity and speed.  If reversed is slower, then it would be mean that something is sly wrong with range.__reversed__ which should be able to iterate backwards as fast as range.__iter__ can go forwards (in part because they would use substantially the same code).

* Minor PEP 8 whitespace changes are generally not accepted. Usually, the code churn isn't worth it.

* [:n] is superfluous but it serves as a nice reminder of the definition of the function and will prevent a bug when I tweak the cut-over point from n >= size to some large fraction of the size (a change I'm currently considering).

nosy: + rhettinger
messages: + msg322310

resolution: rejected
stage: patch review -> resolved