[Python-Dev] Re: anonymous blocks

[Guido van Rossum]

[Greg Ewing]
> I think perhaps I'm not expressing myself very well.
> What I'm after is a high-level explanation that actually
> tells people something useful, and *doesn't* cop out by
> just saying "you're not experienced enough to understand
> this yet".
> 
> If such an explanation can't be found, I strongly suspect
> that this doesn't correspond to a cohesive enough concept
> to be made into a built-in language feature. If you can't
> give a short, understandable explanation of it, then it's
> probably a bad idea.

[Ping]
> In general, i agree with the sentiment of this -- though it's
> also okay if there is a way to break the concept down into
> concepts that *are* simple enough to have short, understandable
> explanations.

I don't know. What exactly is the audience supposed to be of this
high-level statement? It would be pretty darn impossible to explain
even the for-statement to people who are new to programming, let alone
generators. And yet explaining the block-statement *must* involve a
reference to generators. I'm guessing most introductions to Python,
even for experienced programmers, put generators off until the
"advanced" section, because this is pretty wild if you're not used to
a language that has something similar. (I wonder how you'd explain
Python generators to an experienced Ruby programmer -- their mind has
been manipulated to the point where they'd be unable to understand
Python's yield no matter how hard they tried. :-)

If I weren't limited to newbies (either to Python or to programming in
general) but simply had to explain it to Python programmers
pre-Python-2.5, I would probably start with a typical example of the
try/finally idiom for acquiring and releasing a lock, then explain how
for software engineering reasons you'd want to templatize that, and
show the solution with a generator and block-statement.

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