[Python-Dev] Missing operator.call (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Fri Feb 6 09:10:10 CET 2009

Guido van Rossum wrote:

Why is "call expr" a more enticing syntax than "yield *expr" ?

I was thinking it would read better when you're using generators as lightweight threads, and you want the one-level-deep nature of generators to be hidden as much as possible.

The fact that yielding is going on is not of interest in that situation -- it's just an implementation detail. What you really want to express is calling another function, but without losing your status of coroutine-ness.

Another way of thinking about it is that it allows you to abstract out a chunk of code from a generator that contains a 'yield' and put it into another function, and then call it in a way that resembles an ordinary function call as closely as possible.

Maybe 'call' isn't the best word for that, but I haven't thought of anything better so far.

-- Greg

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