this is an alias for skip to parallel the dedicated skip_last function
        to provide a little more readability to the code. the action of actually
        skipping does not occur until the first iteration is done

def skip_first(pipe, items=1):
    ''' this is an alias for skip to parallel the dedicated skip_last function
        to provide a little more readability to the code. the action of actually
        skipping does not occur until the first iteration is done
    '''
    pipe = iter(pipe)
    for i in skip(pipe, items):
        yield i