pythonic way to iterate over part of a list

Question

I want to iterate over everything in a list except the first few elements, e.g.:

for line in lines[2:]:
    foo(line)

This is concise, but

Answer 1

The original solution is, in most cases, the appropriate one.

for line in lines[2:]:
    foo(line)

While this does copy the list, it is only a shallow copy, and is quite quick. Don't worry about optimizing until you have profiled the code and found this to be a bottleneck.