[Python-Dev] Bug or not? Different behaviour iterating list andcollections.deque (original) (raw)

Raymond Hettinger python at rcn.com
Mon Jan 8 18:16:20 CET 2007


"Christos Georgiou"

In retrospection, the example code I chose, although it showed the two issues I thought important ('list / deque iteration discrepancy' and 'empty / non-empty deque iteration discrepancy') was not as plain as needed, ...

Lists are unique in the way they allow mutation during iteration because indexed lookup allows for a meaningful definition of what should be done as the list mutates.

In contrast, deques are more like dictionaries and should not be mutated during iteration. The issue is that a deque could be so substantially modified that there is not a clear, meaningful, and useful definition of what item should be next served-up.

With respect to the second question, please assign an SF report to me and I'll look at it in detail when I have time. It appears to be an idiosyncracy resulting from the ordering of the test for StopIteration versus the test for RuntimeError. The question is whether I can swap the test order without introducing other anomalies.

Raymond

P.S. The patch would look like this:

Index: collectionsmodule.c

--- collectionsmodule.c (revision 53281) +++ collectionsmodule.c (working copy) @@ -911,15 +911,14 @@ { PyObject *item;



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