[Python-ideas] Cofunctions - an enhancement to yield-from

[Scott Dial]

On 8/1/2010 8:16 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:07:06 +1200
> Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>> There are still use cases for
>> 'yield from', when you're dealing with generators that are
>> designed to produce values.
> 
> It was the tree-walking example, right? It really looked like it solved
> a non-existing problem.

I disagree with this opinion. I have run into this pattern before and
while I didn't need the whole generator protocol honored, I would've
benefited just from the fact that the proposed "yield from" flattened
the iteration.

A while back there was a proposal about adding an IP address
manipulation library to stdlib that I took issue with. And so I started
to write my own that met the requirements, and when it came time to
write __iter__ for the IPNetwork class, it was quite natural to use
recursive generators:

def __iter__(self):
    # can I get a "yield from" please?!
    for v in self._iter_more(self._network_address.number,
                             self._host_mask_bits):
        yield v

def _iter_more(self, number_so_far, zerobits):
    if zerobits:
        bit = zerobits[-1]
        zerobits = zerobits[:-1]

        # yield all 'x...x0y...y' addresses
        for v in self._iter_more(number_so_far, zerobits):
            yield v
        # yield all 'x...x1y...y' addresses
        for v in self._iter_more(number_so_far | (1 << bit), zerobits):
            yield v
    else:
	# construct a proper IPAddress instance for the number
        yield self._address_class(number_so_far)

Obviously, it can be flattened by hand, but I doubt it would be as
obvious to read later. I have run into this pattern in other cases where
I was writing my own (specialized) containers, and would expect others
to have as well, unless they were uncomfortable with generators and/or
wrote around the problem.

-- 
Scott Dial
scott at scottdial.com
scodial at cs.indiana.edu

-- 
Scott Dial
scott at scottdial.com
scodial at cs.indiana.edu