[Python-Dev] Re: iterzip() (original) (raw)

Barry A. Warsaw barry@zope.com
Mon, 29 Apr 2002 09:30:42 -0400 

[Barry]
> I'd much rather see a patch that just changed zip() to be an iterator
> instead of adding an iterzip().  I doubt that much in-field code would
> break because of it (but write the PEP to find out. ;).

Gvr> You're brave.  Changing something incompatibly that's been in
Gvr> the language since 2.1?  I wish you luck though -- zip()
Gvr> really should have been an interator.

My point was that since zip()'s output seems to be[*] used mostly in for-loop contexts, the incompatibility is mostly theoretical. I could be wrong, or have too small a sample. This doesn't imply that I actually think it's worth changing, I don't. ;) I think most of the lists operated on by zip() are small enough to fit comfortably in memory.

-Barry

[*] Quickly audited: Python library, site-packages, Zope3, Mailman. All but one (not including test suite) were used as the sequence source in a for-loop or list comp. One was as an argument to list.extend().