The idea is to let generator expressions and list/set comprehensions have a clean syntax to access its last output. That would allow them to be an alternative syntax to the scan higher-order function [1] (today implemented in the itertools.accumulate function), which leads to an alternative way to write a fold/reduce. It would be nice to have something like:
last(abs(prev - x) for x in [3, 4, 5] from prev = 2) 2
instead of a reduce:
from functools import reduce reduce(lambda prev, x: abs(prev - x), [3, 4, 5], 2) 2
or an imperative approach:
prev = 2 for x in [3, 4, 5]: ... prev = abs(prev - x) prev 2
or getting the last from accumulate:
from itertools import accumulate list(accumulate([2, 3, 4, 5], lambda prev, x: abs(prev - x)))[-1] 2
or...
[prev for prev in [2] ... for x in [3, 4, 5] ... for prev in [abs(prev - x)] ... ][-1] 2
Actually, I already wrote a solution for something similar to that: PyScanPrev [2]. I'm using bytecode manipulation to modify the generator expression and set/list comprehensions semantics to create a "scan", but it has the limitation of using only code with a valid syntax as the input, so I can't use "from" inside a generator expression / list comprehension. The solution was to put the first output into the iterable and define the "prev" name elsewhere:
last(abs(prev - x) for x in [2, 3, 4, 5]) 2
That line works with PyScanPrev (on Python 3.4 and 3.5) when defined in a function with a @enable_scan("prev") decorator. That was enough to create a "test suite" of doctest-based examples that shows several scan use cases [2]. This discussion started in a Brazilian list when someone asked how she could solve a simple uppercase/lowercase problem [3]. The goal was to alternate the upper/lower case of a string while neglecting the chars that doesn't apply (i.e., to "keep the state" when the char isn't a letter). After the discussion, I wrote the PyScanPrev package, and recently I've added this historical "alternate" function as the "conditional toggling" example [4]. Then I ask, can Python include that "scan" access to the last output in its list/set/dict comprehension and generator expression syntax? There are several possible applications for the scan itself as well as for the fold/reduce (signal processing, control theory, physics, economics, etc.), some of them I included as PyScanPrev examples. Some friends (people who like control engineering and/or signal processing) liked the "State-space model" example, where I included a "leaking bucket-spring-damper" simulation using the scan-enabled generator expressions [5]. About the syntax, there are several ideas on how that can be written. Given a "prev" identifier, a "target" identifier, an input "iterable" and an optional "start" value (and perhaps an optional "echo_start", which I assume True by default), some of them are: [func(prev, target) for target in iterable from prev = start] [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] -> prev = start [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] -> prev as start [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] from prev = start [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] from prev as start [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] with prev as start prev = start -> [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] prev(start) -> [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] [func(prev, target) for prev -> target in start -> iterable] [prev = start -> func(prev, target) for target in iterable] # With ``start`` being the first value of the iterable, i.e., # iterable = prepend(start, data) [func(prev, target) for target in iterable from prev] [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] -> prev [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] from prev prev -> [func(prev, target) for target in iterable] Before writing PyScanPrev, in [6] (Brazilian Portuguese) I used stackfull [7] to implement that idea, an accumulator example using that library is:
from stackfull import push, pop, stack [push(pop() + el if stack() else el) for el in range(5)] [0, 1, 3, 6, 10] list(itertools.accumulate(range(5))) [0, 1, 3, 6, 10]
There are more I can say (e.g. the pyscanprev.scan function has a "start" value and an "echo_start" keyword argument, resources I missed in itertools.accumulate) but the links below already have a lot of information. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefix_sum#Scan_higher_order_function [2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyscanprev [3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/grupy-sp/wTIj6G5_5S0 [4] https://github.com/danilobellini/pyscanprev/blob/v0.1.0/examples/conditional... [5] https://github.com/danilobellini/pyscanprev/blob/v0.1.0/examples/state-space... [6] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/grupy-sp/UZp-lVSWK1s [7] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/stackfull -- Danilo J. S. Bellini --------------- "*It is not our business to set up prohibitions, but to arrive at conventions.*" (R. Carnap)