Programming :: Popping Off More Than One Item At A Time In A List?

I was reading some code the other day and thought that I saw they were using the list.pop method to pop of more than one item at a time. Something like this.

Code:

l = [ 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e' ]
l.pop(0:3)
['a','b','c']
l
['d','e']

But of course when I looked at invoking the method, it only works for one item at a time. I'm working on a data structure where I'm parcing weather data that is 15 items long that are return in as data in a list that has 3,000 + items. I was wanting to pop off a lists of the 1st 15 items breaking them into chuncks (still trying to figure out how I'm going to store the associations as each day has 2-4 readings an hour for the past 72 hours, so I was wanting to group the days together but have each data point for each time).

I know I can just write a function (with some additional tweaking needed for neg starts to work on the right end):

Code:

def longpop (seq, length=1, start=0):
slice = seq[start:start+length]
del seq[start:start+length]
return slice

But with increasing data sizes, I was wondering if there was a faster built-in way of doing this (perhaps implemented under the hood written originally in C as an extention, for example).