[Python-ideas] PEP draft: context variables

[Nick Coghlan]

On 15 October 2017 at 05:47, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 14 October 2017 at 17:50, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you capture the context eagerly, then there are fewer opportunities to
> > get materially different values from "data = list(iterable)" and "data =
> > iter(context_capturing_iterable)".
> >
> > While that's a valid intent for folks to want to be able to express, I
> > personally think it would be more clearly requested via an expression
> like
> > "data = iter_in_context(iterable)" rather than having it be implicit in
> the
> > way generators work (especially since having eager context capture be
> > generator-only behaviour would create an odd discrepancy between
> generators
> > and other iterators like those in itertools).
>
> OK. I understand the point here - but I'm not sure I see the practical
> use case for iter_in_context. When would something like that be used?
>

Suppose you have some existing code that looks like this:

    results = [calculate_result(a, b) for a, b in data]

If calculate_result is context dependent in some way (e.g. a & b might be
decimal values), then eager evaluation of "calculate_result(a, b)" will use
the context that's in effect on this line for every result.

Now, suppose you want to change the code to use lazy evaluation, so that
you don't need to bother calculating any results you don't actually use:

    results = (calculate_result(a, b) for a, b in data)

In a PEP 550 world, this refactoring now has a side-effect that goes beyond
simply delaying the calculation: since "calculate_result(a, b)" is no
longer executed immediately, it will default to using whatever execution
context is in effect when it actually does get executed, *not* the one
that's in effect on this line.

A context capturing helper for iterators would let you decide whether or
not that's what you actually wanted by instead writing:

    results = iter_in_context(calculate_result(a, b) for a, b in data)

Here, "iter_in_context" would indicate explicitly to the reader that
whenever another item is taken from this iterator, the execution context is
going to be temporarily reset back to the way it was on this line. And
since it would be a protocol based iterator-in-iterator-out function, you
could wrap it around *any* iterator, not just generator-iterator objects.

Cheers,
Nick.

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