On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Guido van Rossum wrote:
First of all, I'm not sure what exactly the issue is with destructive for-loops.
It's just not the way i expect for-loops to work. Perhaps we would need to survey people for objective data, but i feel that most people would be surprised if for x in y: print x for x in y: print x did not print the same thing twice, or if if x in y: print 'got it' if x in y: print 'got it' did not do the same thing twice. I realize this is my own opinion, but it's a fairly strong impression i have. Even if it's okay for for-loops to destroy their arguments, i still think it sets up a bad situation: we may end up with functions manipulating sequence-like things all over, but it becomes unclear whether they destroy their arguments or not. It becomes possible to write a function which sometimes destroys its argument and sometimes doesn't. Bugs get deeper and harder to find. I believe this is where the biggest debate lies: whether "for" should be non-destructive. I realize we are currently on the other side of the fence, but i foresee enough potential pain that i would like you to consider the value of keeping "for" loops non-destructive.
Maybe the for-loop is a red herring? Calling next() on an iterator may or may not be destructive on the underlying "sequence" -- if it is a generator, for example, I would call it destructive.
Well, for a generator, there is no underlying sequence. while 1: print next(gen) makes it clear that there is no sequence, but for x in gen: print x seems to give me the impression that there is.
Perhaps you're trying to assign properties to the iterator abstraction that aren't really there?
I'm assigning properties to "for" that you aren't. I think they are useful properties, though, and worth considering. I don't think i'm assigning properties to the iterator abstraction; i expect iterators to destroy themselves. But the introduction of iterators, in the way they are now, breaks this property of "for" loops that i think used to hold almost all the time in Python, and that i think holds all the time in almost all other languages.
Next, I'm not sure how renaming next() to __next__() would affect the situation w.r.t. the destructivity of for-loops. Or were you talking about some other migration?
The connection is indirect. The renaming is related to: (a) making __next__() a real, honest-to-goodness protocol independent of __iter__; and (b) getting rid of __iter__ on iterators. It's the presence of __iter__ on iterators that breaks the non-destructive-for property. I think the renaming of next() to __next__() is a good idea in any case. It is distant enough from the other issues that it can be done independently of any decisions about __iter__. -- ?!ng