[Python-Dev] More imformative iterator representations (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Apr 6 23:52:29 EDT 2004

Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com>:

This is essentially getting back to what Armin was saying.. if iterators act more like lists, they will be easier to user and will open up some new doors for optimization potential. Adding a way to get the length of some iterators essentially makes them list-like or tuple-like.

But... if an iterator is sufficiently random-access to be able to report its length and produce selected items without doing anything irreversible, wouldn't it make more sense for it to be a (possibly read-only) sequence rather than an iterator in the first place?

In other words, instead of e.g. dict.iteritems() there should be a dict.itemseq() or something that returns a sequence-like view of the dict.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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