[Python-ideas] Introduce collections.Reiterable

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Neil Girdhar writes:

 > You're right that you should go ahead and use something however you
 > want to.  However, there are plenty of times where you can't do that,
 > e.g., you want to know if something is callable before calling it,
 > and similarly if something is reiterable before iterating it and
 > exhausting.  That is the purpose of collections.abc,

I don't think so.  It's documented that way:

    This module provides abstract base classes that can be used to
    test whether a class provides a particular interface; for example,
    whether it is hashable or whether it is a mapping.

But I wouldn't do explicit testing with isinstance, but rather use
implicit assertions (at instantiation time) by deriving from the ABC.
I don't see how Reiterable could be adapted to this style of
programming because the API of iterables is basically fixed (support
__iter__ or __getitem__).

 > and that's what I thought we were discussing.

You were, I agree.  But you proposed a new API, which pretty well
guarantees many discussants will take a more global view, like "do the
use cases justify this addition?"

Another such question is "what exactly is the specification?"  Tim
Delany, for example, AIUI doesn't have a problem with saying that any
iterable is reiterable, because it won't raise an exception if the
program iterates it after exhaustion.  It simply does nothing, but in
some cases that's perfectly acceptable.  I know you disagree, and I
don't think that's a useful definition.  Still it demonstrates the
wide range of opinions on what "reiterable" can or should guarantee.