[Python-ideas] Yield-From: GeneratorExit?

[Nick Coghlan]

Greg Ewing wrote:
> To do otherwise would require making a distinction that
> can't be expressed in the Python expansion. Also, it
> seems elegant to preserve the property that if g is a
> generator then g.close() and g.throw(GeneratorExit) are
> exactly equivalent.
> 
> What do people think about this?

That whole question is why I suggested rephrasing the question of which
exceptions are passed to the subiterator in Exception vs BaseException
terms. The only acknowledged direct subclasses of BaseException are
KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit and GeneratorExit. The purpose of those
exceptions is to say "drop what you're doing and bail out any which way
you can". Terminating the outermost generator in those cases and letting
the subiterators clean up as best they can sounds like a perfectly
reasonable option to me. The alternative is to catch BaseException and
throw absolutely everything (including GeneratorExit) into the
subiterator. The in-between options that you're describing would appear
to just complicate the semantics to no great purpose.

Note that you may also be pursuing a false consistency here, since
g.close() has never been equivalent to g.throw(GeneratorExit), as the
latter propagates the exception back into the current scope while the
former suppresses it (example was run using 2.5.2):

>>> def gen(): yield
...
>>> g = gen()
>>> g.next()
>>> g.close()
>>> g2 = gen()
>>> g2.next()
>>> g2.throw(GeneratorExit)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in gen
GeneratorExit


-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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