[Python-ideas] Revised revised revised PEP on yield-from

[Guillaume Chereau]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Guillaume Chereau wrote:
>
>> But what I don't really like with it, is that when you start to write
>> coroutines, you have to use yield every time you call an other
>> coroutine,
>
> Yes, but that's unavoidable as long as you're faking
> things with generators instead of using real threads,
> unless some other construct is introduced that's
> tantamount to 'yield' by another name -- and then
> you have to remember to use that.
Yes I though about this idea, like adding an attribute to a function
to tell the interpreter to magically yield its result, but that
totally break the mental parsing of the code (not talking about
possible implementation problems).

>
>> and it make the code full of yield statement ; the proposal
>> if adopted would make it even worst.
>
> I don't see how it would be any worse. Your code at
> first glance looks incomprehensible to me -- how am I
> supposed to know that the first 'yield' is a blocking
> operation while the second one is returning a value?
> It relies on obscure conventions implemented by some
> kind of wrapper that you have to learn about.

I Agree, and I don't like it either.
It was just the easer way I found to implement micro threads using generators.
The proposal would indeed make things more logical, specially if we
can use 'return' into the generators.

The point I wanted to make was that then we need to write "yield from"
every time we call a coroutine from an other one, that is probably a
lot, and so made me unhappy about the syntax.

In the context of a coroutine, 'yield from' means : "we start this
other coroutine, and return to the current coroutine when it is done",
and I was expecting the syntax to somehow express this idea.

On the other hand, the other usage of "yield from" (to replace : "for
x in a: yield x") is totally fine.

I tried to think of some other keywords to suggest that would suite
both usages, but couldn't find anything.

Best regards,
Guillaume