On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Peter Moody
On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:55 PM, Guido van Rossum
wrote: On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Ethan Furman
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?
It's possible to return massive lists, (eg, returning the 4+ billion /128 subnets in /96 or something even larger, but I don't think that's very common). I've generally tried to avoid confusion by having 'iter' in the iterating methods, but if more of the methods return iterators, maybe I need to rethink that?
I personally like having 'iter' in the name (e.g. iterkeys() -- note that we dropped this in Py3k because it's no longer an iterator, it's a dict view now. But I don't want to promote that style for ipaddr.py. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)