[Python-Dev] accumulator display syntax
Guido van Rossum
guido at python.org
Fri Oct 17 14:46:34 EDT 2003
> On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 11:55:53AM -0600, Shane Holloway (IEEE) wrote:
> > mygenerator = x for x in S
> >
> > for y in x for x in S:
> > print y
> >
> > return x for x in S
>
> Interesting but potentially confusing: we could expect the last one
> to mean that we executing 'return' repeatedly, i.e. returning a
> value more than once, which is not what occurs.
I'm not sure what you mean by executing 'return' repeatedly; the
closest thing in Python is returning a sequence, and this is pretty
close (for many practical purposes, returning an iterator is just as
good as returning a sequence).
> Similarily,
>
> yield x for x in g()
>
> in a generator would be quite close to the syntax discussed some
> time ago to yield all the values yielded by a sub-generator g, but
> in your proposal it wouldn't have that meaning: it would only yield
> a single object, which happens to be an iterator with the same
> elements as g().
IMO this is not at all similar to what it suggests for return, as
executing 'yield' multiple times *is* a defined thing.
This is why I'd prefer to require extra parentheses;
yield (x for x in g())
is pretty clear about how many times yield is executed.
> Even with parenthesis, and assuming a syntax to yield from a
> sub-generator for performance reason, the two syntaxes would be
> dangerously close:
>
> yield x for x in g() # means for x in g(): yield x
> yield (x for x in g()) # means yield g()
I don't see why we need
yield x for x in g()
when we can already write
for x in g():
yield x
This would be a clear case of "more than one way to do it".
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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