[Python-Dev] PEP czar for PEP 3144?

[Peter Moody]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:55 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> 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?

It's possible to return massive lists, (eg, returning the 4+ billion
/128 subnets in /96 or something even larger, but I don't think that's
very common). I've generally tried to avoid confusion by having 'iter'
in the iterating methods, but if more of the methods return iterators,
maybe I need to rethink that?

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