What is the purpose of a zip function (as in Python or C# 4.0)?

Question

Someone asked How to do Python’s zip in C#?...

...which leads me to ask, what good is zip? In what scenarios do I need this? Is it really so foundational that I n

Answer 1

It allows you to process sequences in parallel instead of sequentially or nested. There's... so many uses for it that they currently escape me.