PEP Proposal: list.first() and list.last() for accessing most important list elements

[bschubert (Brian Schubert)]

Somewhat related:

Add safe `.get` method to List

To access an item in a dictionary, you use indexing: d["some_key"]. However, if the key doesn’t exist in the dictionary, a KeyError is raised. To avoid this, you can use .get and pass in a default value to return instead: d.get("some_key", "default value"). Lists don’t have such a method for safely indexing. There are many ways around it (as documented in many SO threads: thread 1, thread 2), but they’re all pretty awkward and they aren’t composable or chain-able the same way that .get() is. T…