[Python-Dev] Re: Re: anonymous blocks

[Fredrik Lundh]

Josiah Carlson wrote:

> > for my purposes, I've found that the #1 callback killer in contemporary Python
> > is for-in:s support for the iterator protocol:
> ...
> > and get shorter code that runs faster.  (see cElementTree's iterparse for
> > an excellent example.  for typical use cases, it's nearly three times faster
> > than pyexpat, which is the fastest callback-based XML parser we have)
>
> It seems as though you are saying that because callbacks are so slow,
> that blocks are a non-starter for you because of how slow it would be to
> call them.

Not really -- I see the for-in loop body as the block.

The increased speed is just a bonus.

> I'm thinking that if people get correct code easier, that speed will not be as much
> of a concern (that's why I use Python already).

(Slightly OT, but speed is always a concern.  I no longer buy the "it's python,
it has to be slow" line of reasoning; when done correctly, Python code is often
faster than anything else.

cElementTree is one such example; people have reported that cElementTree
plus Python code can be a lot faster than dedicated XPath/XSLT engines; the
Python bytecode engine is extremely fast, also compared to domain-specific
interpreters...

And in this case, you get improved usability *and* improved speed at the
same time.  That's the way it should be.)

> With that said, both blocks and iterators makes /writing/ such things
> easier to understand, but neither really makes /reading/ much easier.
> Sure, it is far more terse, but that doesn't mean it is easier to read
> and understand what is going on.

Well, I was talking about reading here: with the for-in pattern, you loop over
the "callback source", and the "callback" itself is inlined.  You don't have to
think in "here is the callback, here I configure the callback source" terms; just
make a function call and loop over the result.

> Regardless, I believe that solving generator finalization (calling all
> enclosing finally blocks in the generator) is a worthwhile problem to
> solve.  Whether that be by PEP 325, 288, 325+288, etc., that should be
> discussed.  Whether people use it as a pseudo-block, or decide that
> blocks are further worthwhile, I suppose we could wait and see.

Agreed.

</F>