[Python-Dev] PEP czar for PEP 3144?

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> Nick Coghlan wrote:
>>
>> Collapsing the address list has to build the result list anyway to
>> actually handle the deduplication part of its job, so returning a
>> concrete list makes sense in that case.
>
>
> Having only one function return a list instead of an iterator seems
> questionable.
>
> Depending on the code it could either keep track of what it has returned so
> far in a set and avoid duplication that way; or, just return an
> `iter(listobject)` instead of `listobject`.

I know I'm lacking context, but is the list ever expected to be huge?
If not, what's wrong with always returning a list?

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)