On Sep 30, 2015, at 10:47, Chris Barker
On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Serhiy Storchaka
wrote: On 30.09.15 20:18, Neil Girdhar wrote: Ah good point. Well, in the case of a sequence argument, an enumerate object could be both a sequence and an iterator.
It can't be.
For sequence:
x = 'abcd' list(zip(x, x)) [('a', 'a'), ('b', 'b'), ('c', 'c'), ('d', 'd')]
For iterator:
x = iter('abcd') list(zip(x, x)) [('a', 'b'), ('c', 'd')]
well, that's because zip is using the same iterator it two places. would that ever be the case with enumerate?
The point is that _nothing_ can be an iterator and a sequence at the same time. (And therefore, an enumerate object can't be both at the same time.) The zip function is just a handy way of demonstrating the problem; it's not the actual problem. You could also demonstrate it by, e.g., calling len(x), next(x), list(x): If x is an iterator, next(x) will use up the 'a' so list will only give you ['b', 'c', 'd'], even though len gave you 4. Conceptually: iterators are inherently one-shot iterables; sequences are inherently reusable iterables. While there's no explicit rule that __iter__ can't return self for a sequence, there's no reasonable way to make a sequence that does so. Which means no sequence can be an iterator.