[Python-Dev] A `cogen' module [was: Re: PEP 218 (sets); moving set.py to Lib]

[Oren Tirosh]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 10:27:30AM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > Ahh... re-iterability again...
> > 
> > This is a good example of a function that *fails silently* for non 
> > re-iterable arguments.
> 
> This failure is hardly silent IMO: the results are totally bogus,
> which is a pretty good clue that something's wrong.

Sure, at the interactive prompt or very shallow code it is obvious. 

Exceptions are noisy. Anything else is silent.

> > Slurping the tail into a list loses the lazy efficiency of this function. 
> > One of the ways I've used this function is to scan combinations until a 
> > condition is satisfied. The iteration is always terminated before reaching 
> > the end. Reading ahead may waste computation and memory.
> 
> I don't understand.  The Cartesian product calculation has to iterate
> over the second argument many times (unless you have it iterate over
> the first argument many times).  So a lazy argument won't work.  Am I
> missing something?

Even if all the arguments are re-iterable containers the recursive call
produces a lazy generator object - the cartesian product of the tail. I 
don't want to read it eagerly into a list.

	Oren