[Python-Dev] PEP czar for PEP 3144? (original) (raw)

Peter Moody pmoody at google.com
Mon Mar 19 22:58:12 CET 2012

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:55 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:

Nick Coghlan wrote:

Collapsing the address list has to build the result list anyway to actually handle the deduplication part of its job, so returning a concrete list makes sense in that case. Having only one function return a list instead of an iterator seems questionable. Depending on the code it could either keep track of what it has returned so far in a set and avoid duplication that way; or, just return an iter(listobject) instead of listobject. I know I'm lacking context, but is the list ever expected to be huge? If not, what's wrong with always returning a list?

It's possible to return massive lists, (eg, returning the 4+ billion /128 subnets in /96 or something even larger, but I don't think that's very common). I've generally tried to avoid confusion by having 'iter' in the iterating methods, but if more of the methods return iterators, maybe I need to rethink that?

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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