Pop multiple items from the beginning and end of a list

From a performance point of view:

• mylist = mylist[2:-2] and del mylist[:2];del mylist[-2:] are equivalent
• they are around 3 times faster than the first solution for _ in range(2): mylist.pop(0); mylist.pop()

Code

iterations = 1000000
print timeit.timeit('''mylist=range(9)\nfor _ in range(2): mylist.pop(0); mylist.pop()''', number=iterations)/iterations
print timeit.timeit('''mylist=range(9)\nmylist = mylist[2:-2]''', number=iterations)/iterations
print timeit.timeit('''mylist=range(9)\ndel mylist[:2];del mylist[-2:]''', number=iterations)/iterations

output

1.07710313797e-06

3.44465017319e-07

3.49956989288e-07