A dumb question about a class

[Steven Bethard]

Dick Moores wrote:
> At 03:35 PM 8/12/2007, Steven Bethard wrote:
>> Note that if you just want to iterate over all the primes, there's no
>> need for the class at all.  Simply write::
>>
>>      for prime in iter_primes():
> 
> Even if I want to test only 1 integer, or want the list of primes in a 
> certain interval, I don't need the class at all

Yep.  That was the basis of my original feeling that the recipe was 
kinda overkill.

> Thanks for your help. I didn't learn much about classes, but appreciated 
> your iter_primes() a lot!

You're welcome, though I can't actually take credit for iter_primes(). 
The original version is due to Tim Hochberg, in a comment on this recipe:

     http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/117119

FWIW, he says that he "managed to generate all primes up to 909,691 
before it bombed the Python interpreter mysteriously, but it takes a while!"

I'm not particularly married to that prime generator. For your purposes, 
any generator version of iter_primes() is probably more useful than the 
class you were looking at. You can see some other implementations of 
prime generators on that same recipe page.

STeVe