When I started writing this patch this was actually what I intended. But
having ``fixlen(range(3), 2)`` return 0 1 2 struck me as odd. Renaming
the function to `pad` would help there indeed.

It depends on which use case is more common: either fixing an iterator
to a certain length (slicing/padding applied as required) or obtaining
an iterator of *at least* some number of elements (padded as required)?

The thread on python-ideas suggests the latter while the example Python
code brought up there implements the former. OTOH the latter cannot be
composed *that easily* of other itertools but the former is more useful
for unpacking.

On a related note: what should happen if `length` is negative?
`itertools.repeat` just defaults to 0 in such cases but I am unsure how
applicable that is in this case.