[Python-Dev] feature request: inspect.isgenerator (original) (raw)

Michael Chermside mcherm at mcherm.com
Thu Jun 1 19🔞49 CEST 2006

Phillip J. Eby writes:

Yes, I think the whole concept of inspecting for this is broken. Any function can return a generator-iterator. A generator function is just a function that happens to always return one.

Just following up on Phillip's comments, consider the following functions:

 def foo(x):
     while still_going(x):
        yield some_func(x)

 def bar(x):
     while still_going(x):
         yield other_func(x)

 def foo_or_bar(x):
     if some_condition(x):
         return foo(x)
     else:
         return bar(x)

I presume that Michele's proposal is that inspect.isgenerator() (or perhaps "inspect.isgenfunc()") would return True for "foo" and "bar" but false for "foo_or_bar". Can you give a single use case for which that distinction is desirable?

-- Michael Chermside

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