[Python-Dev] xrange vs generators

[Guido van Rossum]

> Hmm.  I'd rather not endure the resulting complaints without a
> strong rationale for deprecating it.  One that strikes close to my
> heart: there's more code in 2.2 to support xrange than there is to
> support generators!  But users don't care about that.

But I do, and historically this code has often been bug-ridden without
anybody noticing -- so it's not like it's needed much.

I would suggest to remove most of the fancy features of xrange(), in
particular the slice, contains and repeat slots.  A step further would
be to remove getitem also, and add a tp_getiter slot instead --
returning not itself but a new iterator that iterates through the
prescribed sequence.

We need a PEP for this.  Anyone?  Should be short and sweet.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)