[Python-Dev] Ancient use of generators

[Guido van Rossum]

For those interested in tracking the history of generators and coroutines
in Python, I just found out that PEP 342
<https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0342/> (which introduced
send/throw/close and made "generators as coroutines" a mainstream Python
concept) harks back to PEP 288 <https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0288/>,
which was rejected. PEP 288 also proposed some changes to generators. The
interesting bit though is in the references: there are two links to old
articles by David Mertz that describe using generators in state machines
and other interesting and unconventional applications of generators. All
these well predated PEP 342, so yield was a statement and could not receive
a value from the function calling next() -- communication was through a
shared class instance.

http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/charming_python_b5.txt
http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/charming_python_b7.txt

Enjoy!

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