March 19, 2012
2:55 p.m.
On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
Nick Coghlan wrote:
Collapsing the address list has to build the result list anyway to actually handle the deduplication part of its job, so returning a concrete list makes sense in that case.
Having only one function return a list instead of an iterator seems questionable.
Depending on the code it could either keep track of what it has returned so far in a set and avoid duplication that way; or, just return an `iter(listobject)` instead of `listobject`.
I know I'm lacking context, but is the list ever expected to be huge? If not, what's wrong with always returning a list? -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)