In the OP’s example, the lists decrease in length. For any other shape of input, we can only assume what the desired behaviour is. What you say is a “safe” solution may be different to what the user is expecting.
- Maybe lists that do not decrease in length is an error in their case, not something that should be transparently handled.
- Maybe their code makes assumptions based on the position in the list.
These implementations make assumptions that have caveats. It’s possible the OP (or reader) had not considered this and is why I asked for clarification.
