Iterating over a function call

[Terry Reedy]

On 2/1/2010 11:50 AM, Gerald Britton wrote:
> Hi -- I have many sections of code like this:
>
>      for value in value_iterator:
>           value_function(value)
>
> I noticed that this does two things I don't like:
>
> 1. looks up "value_function" and "value" for each iteration, but
> "value_function" doesn't change.

What you mean by 'looks up'? And why are you bothered by normal Python 
expression evaluation? Within a function, the 'look_up' is a fast 
LOAD_FAST instruction.

> 2. side effect of (maybe) leaking the iterator variable "value" into
> the code following the loop (if the iterator is not empty).

So? it is sometime useful.
>
> I can take care of 2 by explicitly deleting the variable at the end:
>
>     del value
>
> but I'd probably forget to do that sometimes.

So? If having 'value' bound breaks your subsequent code, I consider it 
buggy.

   I then realized that,
> in the 2.x series, I can accomplish the same thing with:
>
>      map(value_function, value_iterator)
>
> and avoid both problems BUT map() returns a list which is never used.
> Not a big deal for small iterables, I guess, but it seems messy.  Upon
> conversion to 3.x I have to explicitly list-ify it:
>
>      list(map(value_function, value_iterator))
>
> which works but again the list returned is never used (extra work) and
> has to be gc'd I suppose (extra memory).
>
> It's easy to make a little function to take care of this (2.x):
>
>      from itertools import imap
>      def apply(function, iterable):
>          for item in imap(function, iterable):
>              pass

collections.deque(imap(function, iterable), maxlen=0)
will do nearly the same and may be faster.

> then later:
>
>     apply(value_function, value_iterator)
>
> or something similar thing in 3.x, but that just adds an additional
> function def that I have to include whenever I want to do something
> like this.
>
> So.....I'm wondering if there is any interest in an apply() built-in
> function that would work like map() does in 2.x (calls the function
> with each value returned by the iterator) but return nothing.  Maybe
> "apply" isn't the best name; it's just the first one that occurred to
> me.
>
> Or is this just silly and should I forget about it?

In my opinion, forget about it.

Terry Jan Reedy