As pointed out by Steven, the _are_ the same thing. When I teach interators and generators, I get a bit tangled up explaining what the difference is, and why Python has both. This is what I say:

Conceptually ( outside of language constructs):

An "generator" is something that, well, generates value on the fly, as requested, until there are no more to generate, and then terminates.

A "iterator" on the other had is something that produces the values in a pre-existing sequence of values, until there are no more.

IN practice, python uses the exact same protocol (the iterator protocol -- __iter__, __next__) for both, so that you can write, e.g. a for loop, and not have to know whether the underlying object you are looping through is iterating or generating...

As you can write a "generator" in the sense above in a class that supports the iterator protocol (and, can, in fact, write an "iterator" with a generator function), then I say that generator functions really are only syntactic sugar -- they are short and sweet and do much of the book keeping for you.

But given all that keeping the protocols as similar as possible is a *good* thing, not a bad one -- they should behave as much as possible teh same.

If StopIteration bubbles up from inside an iterator, wouldn't that silently terminate as well?

Honestly, I'm a bit lost -- but my point is this -- generators and iterators should behave as much the same as possible.

-Chris