NumPy first and last element from array

I ended here, because I googled for "python first and last element of array", and found everything else but this. So here's the answer to the title question:

a = [1,2,3]
a[0] # first element (returns 1)
a[-1] # last element (returns 3)

How about:

In [10]: arr = numpy.array([1,23,4,6,7,8])

In [11]: [(arr[i], arr[-i-1]) for i in range(len(arr) // 2)]
Out[11]: [(1, 8), (23, 7), (4, 6)]

Depending on the size of arr, writing the entire thing in NumPy may be more performant:

In [41]: arr = numpy.array([1,23,4,6,7,8]*100)

In [42]: %timeit [(arr[i], arr[-i-1]) for i in range(len(arr) // 2)]
10000 loops, best of 3: 167 us per loop

In [43]: %timeit numpy.vstack((arr, arr[::-1]))[:,:len(arr)//2]
100000 loops, best of 3: 16.4 us per loop