Josiah Carlson wrote:
for my purposes, I've found that the #1 callback killer in contemporary Python is for-in:s support for the iterator protocol: ... and get shorter code that runs faster. (see cElementTree's iterparse for an excellent example. for typical use cases, it's nearly three times faster than pyexpat, which is the fastest callback-based XML parser we have)
It seems as though you are saying that because callbacks are so slow, that blocks are a non-starter for you because of how slow it would be to call them.
Not really -- I see the for-in loop body as the block. The increased speed is just a bonus.
I'm thinking that if people get correct code easier, that speed will not be as much of a concern (that's why I use Python already).
(Slightly OT, but speed is always a concern. I no longer buy the "it's python, it has to be slow" line of reasoning; when done correctly, Python code is often faster than anything else. cElementTree is one such example; people have reported that cElementTree plus Python code can be a lot faster than dedicated XPath/XSLT engines; the Python bytecode engine is extremely fast, also compared to domain-specific interpreters... And in this case, you get improved usability *and* improved speed at the same time. That's the way it should be.)
With that said, both blocks and iterators makes /writing/ such things easier to understand, but neither really makes /reading/ much easier. Sure, it is far more terse, but that doesn't mean it is easier to read and understand what is going on.
Well, I was talking about reading here: with the for-in pattern, you loop over the "callback source", and the "callback" itself is inlined. You don't have to think in "here is the callback, here I configure the callback source" terms; just make a function call and loop over the result.
Regardless, I believe that solving generator finalization (calling all enclosing finally blocks in the generator) is a worthwhile problem to solve. Whether that be by PEP 325, 288, 325+288, etc., that should be discussed. Whether people use it as a pseudo-block, or decide that blocks are further worthwhile, I suppose we could wait and see.
Agreed. </F>