feat: Support a wider range of iterables in SchemaBase.to_dict

[dangotbanned]

Fixes: #2808 and #2877

Supersedes #3237

CI Failures

See #3501 (comment)

Notes

Huge thanks to @MarcoGorelli as narwhals made this feature super simple to implement.

In addition to handling Sequence like types, an Iterator can safely be passed to narwhals.from_native without being consumed.

Code block

import narwhals.stable.v1 as nw

elements = [1,2,3]
it = iter(elements)
some_obj = nw.from_native(it,strict=False)

>>> list(it) == elements
True

---

#2808 Cases

Large screenshots

#2877 Case

Large screenshot

Tasks

• Update User Guide

[joelostblom]

Looking great overall @dangotbanned , thank you again! A few comments / questions.

[dangotbanned]

Looking great overall @dangotbanned , thank you again! A few comments / questions.

Thanks for taking the time to review @joelostblom

Will wait for your response before making any changes

[joelostblom]

Thanks for responding to the comment @dangotbanned ! At a cursory glance it all looks good but I will review more in detail and try it out when I'm back from vacation in about a week

[joelostblom]

Looking great! I found a day to review this more in depth and left a few comments. I should be able to take another look in ~4 days.

[joelostblom]

As part of this PR, could you also update the docs here https://altair-viz.github.io/user_guide/encodings/index.html#sort-option to not only mention that lists can be passed but any ordered sequence would work?

[dangotbanned]

Looking great! I found a day to review this more in depth and left a few comments. I should be able to take another look in ~4 days.

Thanks for the second look @joelostblom

I'm going to work through your comments after this, but thought I'd give a heads-up on #3501 (commits)

After reading your comments this morning, I got the feeling that the focus on ordering/sets had overlooked the much broader scope of this change.

I think this was my mistake by writing tests that only covered alt.X(sort=).
I've updated these to show that this applies anywhere that previously could only accept a (list|tuple) - provided the value type matches the schema.

Great point, maybe we should strictly adhere to passing only ordered sequences/arrays and disallow passing unordered sets?

The ordering requirement makes a lot of sense for sort, but wouldn't be applicable in every case - especially when someone may be using a set to get unique values.

[dangotbanned]

As part of this PR, could you also update the docs here altair-viz.github.io/user_guide/encodings/index.html#sort-option to not only mention that lists can be passed but any ordered sequence would work?

Yeah that sounds like a good idea, thanks @joelostblom I will work on that for the next commit

[joelostblom]

Thanks again for this contribution and your patience with the review process @dangotbanned. I only have a few minor comments/clarifications left and then we should be ready to merge.

[joelostblom]

Super, thanks for the quick turn around! I'm excited to merge this PR and no longer have to convert series etc to lists explicitly =) Thanks again!