[Python-ideas] yield from multiple iterables (was Re: The async API of the future: yield-from)

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Jasper St. Pierre
<jstpierre at mecheye.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Jasper St. Pierre
>> <jstpierre at mecheye.net> wrote:
>>> I'm curious now... you keep mentioning Futures and Deferreds like
>>> they're two separate entities. What distinction between the two do you
>>> see?
>>
>> They have different interfaces and you end up using them differently.
>
> Who is "you" supposed to refer to?
>
>> In particular, quoting myself from another thread, here is how I use
>> the terms:
>>
>> - Future: something with roughly the interface but not necessarily the
>> implementation of PEP 3148.
>>
>> - Deferred: the Twisted Deferred class or something with very similar
>> functionality (there are some in the JavaScript world).
>>
>> The big difference between Futures and Deferreds is that Deferreds can
>> easily be chains together to create multiple stages, and each callback
>> is called with the value returned from the previous stage; also,
>> Deferreds have separate callback chains for regular values and errors.
>
> Chaining is an add-on to the system and not necessarily required.
> Dojo's Deferreds, modelled directly after Twisted's, don't have direct
> chaining with multiple callbacks per Deferred, but instead addCallback
> returns a new Deferred, which it may pass on to. This means that each
> Deferred has one result, and chaining is done slightly differently.
>
> The whole point of chaining is just convenience of mutating a value
> before it's passed to the caller. It's possible to live without it.
> Compare:
>
>     from async_http_client import fetch_page
>     from some_xml_library import parse_xml
>
>     def fetch_xml(url):
>         d = fetch_page(url)
>         d.add_callback(parse_xml)
>         return d
>
> with:
>
>     def fetch_xml(url):
>         def parse_page(result):
>             d.callback(parse_xml(result))
>
>         d = Deferred()
>         page = fetch_page(url)
>         page.add_callback(parse_page)
>         return d
>
> The two functions, treated as a black box, are equivalent. The
> distinction is convenience.

Jasper, I don't know you. You may be  a wizard-levelTwisted user, or
maybe you once saw a Twisted tutorial. All I know is that when I
started this discussion I used the term Future thinking Deferreds were
just Futures, and then Twisted core developers started explaining me
that Deferreds are so much more than Futures (I think it may have been
Glyph himself, in one of his longer posts). So please go argue the
distinction or similarity with the Twisted core developers, not with
me.

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