[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 276 (simple iterator for ints) (original) (raw)

Nicolas Fleury nidoizo at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 5 00:07:25 CEST 2004

Andrew Koenig wrote:

IMO it would be clearer, and equally elegant, to write this as something like

for i in indices(myList): ... I think that for i in myList.keys(): would be even better, because it allow the same usage for dict and list. Of course that wouldn't generalize to other sequences that support len.

Wouldn't be better then that indices returns the keys for a dictionary instead? It would then support all these sequences. Maybe an index is not the good term to generalize, but I don't think key is really better, particularly since I would expect the use of a dictionary to be more rare.

Maybe another function, let's say accesses, could be used for these rare cases, adding no overhead for common cases of indices: for key in accesses(myDict): pass for index in accesses(myList): pass

But since iterating through a dictionary means to iterate through the keys, while it means to iterate through the elements for a list, would that be really uniform to support generalization with dictionaries? Is it useful?

Regards, Nicolas

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