[Python-ideas] Cofunctions: It's alive! Its alive!

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Greg Ewing
<greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>> - The syntax worries me. Your PEP suggests that cocall binds tightly
>> to an atom. That would mean that if the cofunction is really a
>> comethod, you'd have to parenthesis it,
>
> No, if you examine the grammar in the PEP you'll see that
> the atom can be followed by a subset of the trailers allowed
> after atoms in other contexts, so it's possible to write
> things like
>
>   x = cocall foo.blarg[42].stuff(y)
>
> which parses as
>
>   x = cocall (foo.blarg[42].stuff)(y)

I would expect the grammatical rules for cocall expressions to be
similar to those for yield expressions. And if they weren't, I'd want
to hear a really good excuse for the inconsistency :)

Also, a possible trick to make a @cofunction decorator work:

class cofunction:
    # Obviously missing a bunch of stuff to tidy up the metadata
    def __init__(self, f):
        self._f = f

    def __cocall__(*args, **kwds):
        self, *args = *args
        return yield from self._f(*args, **kwds)

Cofunctions then wouldn't even *have* a __call__ slot, so you couldn't
call them normally by mistake, and ordinary functions wouldn't define
__cocall__ so you couldn't invadvertently use them with the new
keyword.

Cheers,
Nick.

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