[Python-ideas] Membership of infinite iterators

[Nick Coghlan]

On 18 October 2017 at 22:36, Koos Zevenhoven <k7hoven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 2:08 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> That one can only be fixed in count() - list already checks
>> operator.length_hint(), so implementing itertools.count.__length_hint__()
>> to always raise an exception would be enough to handle the container
>> constructor case.
>>
>
> While that may be a convenient hack to solve some of the cases, maybe it's
> possible for list(..) etc. to give Ctrl-C a chance every now and then?
> (Without a noticeable performance penalty, that is.) That would also help
> with *finite* C-implemented iterables that are just slow to turn into a
> list.
>
> If I'm not mistaken, we're talking about C-implemented functions that
> iterate over C-implemented iterators. It's not at all obvious to me that
> it's the iterator that should handle Ctrl-C.
>

It isn't, it's the loop's responsibility. The problem is that one of the
core design assumptions in the CPython interpreter implementation is that
signals from the operating system get handled by the opcode eval loop in
the main thread, and Ctrl-C is one of those signals.

This is why "for x in itertools.cycle(): pass" can be interrupted, while
"sum(itertools.cycle())" can't: in the latter case, the opcode eval loop
isn't running, as we're inside a tight loop inside the sum() implementation.

It's easy to say "Well those loops should all be checking for signals
then", but I expect folks wouldn't actually like the consequences of doing
something about it, as:

1. It will make those loops slower, due to the extra overhead of checking
for signals (even the opcode eval loop includes all sorts of tricks to
avoid actually checking for new signals, since doing so is relatively slow)
2. It will make those loops harder to maintain, since the high cost of
checking for signals means the existing flat loops will need to be replaced
with nested ones to reduce the per-iteration cost of the more expensive
checks
3. It means making the signal checking even harder to reason about than it
already is, since even C implemented methods that avoid invoking arbitrary
Python code could now still end up checking for signals

It's far from being clear to me that making such a change would actually be
a net improvement, especially when there's an opportunity to mitigate the
problem by having known-infinite iterators report themselves as such.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20171019/382905de/attachment-0001.html>