On Friday 19 July 2002 04:23 pm, Aahz wrote:
On Fri, Jul 19, 2002, Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
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.
Consider
for line in f.readlines():
in any version of Python. Adding iterators made this more convenient and efficient, but I just can't see your POV in the general case.
The 'for', per se, is destroying nothing here -- the object returned by f.readlines() is destroyed by its reference count falling to 0 after the for, just as, say: for c in raw_input(): or x = raw_input()+raw_input() and so forth. I.e., any object gets destroyed if there are no more references to it -- that's a completely different issue. In all of these cases, you can, if you want, just bind a name to the object as you call the function, then use that object over and over again at will. _Method calls_ mutating the object on which they're called is indeed quite common, of course. f.readlines() does mutate f's state. But the object it returns, as long as there are references to it, remains. Alex