Meta: PEP discussion (was Re: PEP 255: Simple Generators)

Steven D. Majewski sdm7g at Virginia.EDU
Thu Jun 21 16:32:53 EDT 2001


On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Tim Peters wrote:

> Heh.  If you had only finished *your* generator implementation 9 years ago
> instead of getting sucked into the continuation pit, we could be using
> 
> sdm f(i):
>     suspend i+1
> 
> today <wink>.

I think one of the bug missing pieces to make it fit smoothly into
Python was iterators. 

My 'suspend value' actually got transformed into returning the tuple
 (value, suspended-frame), so to use it in a loop required something
like:

	iterf  = function  # don't mung up the global name 
	while 1:
		value, iterf = iterf( args... ) 
		...	# first time, call the function
			# all others, call the suspended activation frame



Back in those ancient pre-PEP days, Guido was much more conservative.
And there were fewer people to bounce ideas off of --- I recall I 
was soliciting ideas for a more pythonic syntax, but there wasn't
much interest. ( And the above hack was even too ugly for ME to 
defend! ) 


-- Steve 






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