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

Here's a common use case for zip:

x = [1,2,3,4,5]
y = [6,7,8,9,0]

for a,b in zip(x,y):
    print a, b

Which would output:

1 6
2 7
3 8
4 9
5 0