while (a=b()) ...

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <015401be9eeb$5e130300$f29b12c2 at pythonware.com>,
Fredrik Lundh <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote:
>Aahz Maruch <aahz at netcom.com> wrote:
>>
>> What does this give you that
>> 
>>   for line in f.readline()
>>     frobulate(line)
>> 
>> does not?  (Assuming the necessary semantic changes to permit this to
>> work *well*.)
>
>fwiw, this already works well.  it does exactly
>what it's supposed to do -- that is, iterate over
>the character sequence returned by the call
>to readline.

It works "correctly" from a Python perspective, but it doesn't do what a
cursory glance would expect from someone who doesn't know Python.  In
any event, I should have written

   for line in f.readlines()

But even that is beside the point.  The point is that it's currently a
bit harder than it should be to build such iterator idioms in the
general case; fix that and we get rid of most of the whiners.
-- 
                      --- Aahz (@netcom.com)

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