On 15 October 2017 at 05:39, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
On 15 October 2017 at 05:47, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
On 14 October 2017 at 17:50, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
If you capture the context eagerly, then there are fewer opportunities to get materially different values from "data = list(iterable)" and "data = iter(context_capturing_iterable)".
While that's a valid intent for folks to want to be able to express, I personally think it would be more clearly requested via an expression like "data = iter_in_context(iterable)" rather than having it be implicit in the way generators work (especially since having eager context capture be generator-only behaviour would create an odd discrepancy between generators and other iterators like those in itertools).
OK. I understand the point here - but I'm not sure I see the practical use case for iter_in_context. When would something like that be used?
Suppose you have some existing code that looks like this:
results = [calculate_result(a, b) for a, b in data]
If calculate_result is context dependent in some way (e.g. a & b might be decimal values), then eager evaluation of "calculate_result(a, b)" will use the context that's in effect on this line for every result.
Now, suppose you want to change the code to use lazy evaluation, so that you don't need to bother calculating any results you don't actually use:
results = (calculate_result(a, b) for a, b in data)
In a PEP 550 world, this refactoring now has a side-effect that goes beyond simply delaying the calculation: since "calculate_result(a, b)" is no longer executed immediately, it will default to using whatever execution context is in effect when it actually does get executed, *not* the one that's in effect on this line.
A context capturing helper for iterators would let you decide whether or not that's what you actually wanted by instead writing:
results = iter_in_context(calculate_result(a, b) for a, b in data)
Here, "iter_in_context" would indicate explicitly to the reader that whenever another item is taken from this iterator, the execution context is going to be temporarily reset back to the way it was on this line. And since it would be a protocol based iterator-in-iterator-out function, you could wrap it around *any* iterator, not just generator-iterator objects.
OK, got it. That sounds to me like a candidate for a stdlib function (either because it's seen as a common requirement, or because it's tricky to get right - or both). The PEP doesn't include it, as far as I can see, though. But I do agree with MAL, it seems wrong to need a helper for this, even though it's a logical consequence of the other semantics I described as intuitive :-( Paul