In Groovy we can use the head and tail methods for a long time on Collection objects. With head we get the first element and with tailthe remaining elements of a collection. Since Groovy 2.4 we have a new method init which returns all elements but the last in a collection.

In the following example we have a simple list and apply the different methods:

def gr8Tech = ['Groovy', 'Grails', 'Spock', 'Gradle', 'Griffon']

// Since Groovy 2.4 we can use the init method.
assert gr8Tech.init() == ['Groovy', 'Grails', 'Spock', 'Gradle']
assert gr8Tech.last() == 'Griffon'
assert gr8Tech.head() == 'Groovy'
assert gr8Tech.tail() == ['Grails', 'Spock', 'Gradle', 'Griffon']

Code written with Groovy 2.4.