[Python-Dev] generator comprehension syntax, was:
accumulator display syntax
Phillip J. Eby
pje at telecommunity.com
Fri Oct 17 23:28:39 EDT 2003
At 09:10 PM 10/17/03 -0400, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>[GvR]
> > I'd just like to pipe into this discussion saying that while Peter
> > Norvig's pre-PEP is neat, I'd reject it if it were a PEP; the main
> > reason that the proposed notation doesn't return a list. I agree that
> > having generator comprehensions would be a more general solution. I
> > don't have a proposal for generator comprehension syntax though, and
> > [yield ...] has the same problem.
>
>Is Phil's syntax acceptable to everyone?
>
> (yield: x*x for x in roots)
Ironically, I'm opposed. :)
* Yield is a control flow statement, this is an expression
* yield: looks like lambda, and this is not a function
* Yield only makes sense if you come into this thinking about generators
* Yield distracts from the purpose of the expression
To put it another way, Python is "executable pseudocode". Listcomps are
pseudocode. Yield in a generator is pseudocode. (x*x for x in roots) is
pseudocode. But (yield: x*x for x in roots) looks like some kind of weird
programming language gibberish. :)
I think the worst misinterpretation I could have about the yield-less
syntax is that I might think it was a "tuple comprehension" or something
that returned a sequence instead of an iterator. However, I'll find out
it's not a sequence or tuple if I try to do anything with it that requires
a sequence or tuple. My worst case problem is re-execution of the iterator.
Which, by the way, brings up a question: should iterator comps be
reiterable? I don't see any reason right now why they shouldn't be, and
can think of situations where reiterability would be useful.
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