[Python-3000] range() issues

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 10:36 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
..
>  There are good reasons for having range() return an Iterable and not
>  an Iterator; e.g.
>
>  R = range(N)
>  for i in R:
>   for j in R:
>     ....

You realize that in the snippet above whatever cycles you save by
creating R once, you give away by creating iter(R) twice.  So compared
to range() returning an iterator and having to write

for i in range(N):
  for j in range(N):
...

you have 3 vs. 2 auxiliary objects created.  And how often do you see
code that will not benefit from being generalized from square to
rectangular matrices?

Lots of C code will go away if we nix the range object and leave only
rangeiterator!