I haven't used itertools yet, so I don't know their capabilities. I have used map twice recently with None as the first argument. This was also the first time I've used map, and was dissapointed when I found out about the truncation. The lists map was iterating over in my case were of unequal lengths, so I had to pad the lists to make sure nothing was truncated.
The most universal solution would be to provide a mechanism to truncate, pad, or remain the same length. However, with the pad feature, room should be provided for the user to add the pad item. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
