[Python-ideas] Membership of infinite iterators

[Koos Zevenhoven]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 2:46 PM, Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 17.10.17 14:10, Nick Coghlan пише:
>
>> 1. It's pretty easy to write "for x in y in y" when you really meant to
>> write "for x in y", and if "y" is an infinite iterator, the "y in y" part
>> will become an unbreakable infinite loop when executed instead of the
>> breakable one you intended (especially annoying if it means you have to
>> discard and restart a REPL session due to it, and that's exactly where that
>> kind of typo is going to be easiest to make)
>>
>
> I think it is better to left this on linters.


​Just to note that there is currently nothing that would prevent making
`for x in y in z`​ a syntax error. There is nothing meaningful that it
could do, really, because y in z can only return True or False (or raise an
Exception or loop infinitely).

But for an infinite iterable, the right answer may be Maybe ;)

​––Koos​



> I never encountered this mistake and doubt it is common. In any case the
> first execution of this code will expose the mistake.
>
> 2. Containment testing already has a dedicated protocol so containers can
>> implement optimised containment tests, which means it's also trivial for an
>> infinite iterator to intercept and explicitly disallow containment checks
>> if it chooses to do so
>>
>
> But this has non-zero maintaining cost. As the one who made many changes
> in itertools.c I don't like the idea of increasing its complexity for
> optimizing a pretty rare case.
>
> And note that the comparison can have side effect. You can implement the
> optimization of `x in count()` only for the limited set of builtin types.
> For example `x in range()` is optimized only for exact int and bool. You
> can't guarantee the finite time for cycle() and repeat() either since they
> can emit values of arbitrary types, with arbitrary __eq__.
>
>
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-- 
+ Koos Zevenhoven + http://twitter.com/k7hoven +
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