What is the purpose of a zip function (as in Python or C# 4.0)?

Question

Someone asked How to do Python’s zip in C#?...

...which leads me to ask, what good is zip? In what scenarios do I need this? Is it really so foundational that I n

Answer 1

A use case:

>>> fields = ["id", "name", "location"]
>>> values = ["13", "bill", "redmond"]
>>> dict(zip(fields, values))
{'location': 'redmond', 'id': '13', 'name': 'bill'}

Try doing this without zip...