[Python-ideas] PEP draft: context variables

[Nick Coghlan]

On 10 October 2017 at 22:51, Koos Zevenhoven <k7hoven at gmail.com> wrote:

> ​I see no reason why these two should be equivalent.
>

There is no "should" about it: it's a brute fact that the two forms *are*
currently equivalent for lazy iterators (including generators), and both
different from the form that uses eager evaluation of the values before the
context change.

Where should enters into the picture is by way of PEP 550 saying that they
should *remain* equivalent because we don't have an adequately compelling
justification for changing the runtime semantics.

That is, given the following code:

    itr = make_iter()
    with decimal.localcontext() as ctx:
        ctc.prex = 30
        for i in itr:
          pass

Right now, today, in 3.6. the calculations in the iterator will use the
modified decimal context, *not* the context that applied when the iterator
was created. If you want to ensure that isn't the case, you have to force
eager evaluation before the context change.

What PEP 550 is proposing is that, by default, *nothing changes*: the lazy
iteration in the above will continue to use the updated decimal context by
default.

However, people *will* gain a new option for avoiding that: instead of
forcing eager evaluation, they'll be able to capture the creation context
instead, and switching back to that each time the iterator needs to
calculate a new value.

If PEP 555 proposes that we should instead make lazy iteration match eager
evaluation semantics by *default*, then that's going to be a much harder
case to make because it's a gratuitous compatibility break - code that
currently works one way will suddenly start doing something different, and
end users will have difficulty getting it to behave the same way on 3.7 as
it does on earlier versions.

Cheers,
Nick.

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