[binary132]

why not just iterate in steps of three over items for each next group? seems a bit contrived.

[Benjamin_Dobell]

Because it's a simplified example to demonstrate the problem. If you do as you've described you need three separate assignments. What happens when the number of groups is dynamic? Nested loop? This is suddenly getting a lot more complicated.

[binary132]

Yes, that’s what I was saying:

for each group:

for i in steps of #groups:

assign item to this group

I think that’s a lot easier to comprehend than the modulus trick

[dvdkon]

For a lot of people the modulo approach isn't a "trick", it's just the intuitive way to split items into residue classes. And it's likely a little more cache-efficient.

[binary132]

well clearly your comment is meant to demonstrate that it’s a clumsy approach in a 1-indexed syntax, so perhaps a different technique would be more facile here… such as a counting method :)