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PEP 255: Simple Generators

Denys Duchier Denys.Duchier at ps.uni-sb.de
Thu Jun 21 11:14:19 EDT 2001 
Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes:

> Well, that settles it -- I find Tim's version much easier to read
> than Denys's version.  Thanks for playing. :-)

Ouch!

of course the PEP 255 way will usually be easier to read: that's the
entire point of introducing concrete linguistic support for a new
computational mechanism.  I was discussing mechanisms.  PEP 255
proposes both a mechanism and concrete syntax to support it.  I
pointed out that the proposed mechanism had important limitations
(well, important to me I suppose: I like it when abstractions can
commute; this is not the case with the generators of PEP 255) and I
offered a more general mechanism, but I did not suggest convenient
concrete syntax for it.

Note that my proposal is not in contradiction with PEP 255.  Instead
PEP 255 can be viewed as offering nice concrete syntax for the common
case, but with my proposal, a power-user is not stuck with just the
common case :-)

I guess the bottom-line is that as an academic I like generality, but
that's just not the Python way :-)

Cheers,

-- 
Dr. Denys Duchier			Denys.Duchier at ps.uni-sb.de
Forschungsbereich Programmiersysteme	(Programming Systems Lab)
Universitaet des Saarlandes, Geb. 45	http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier
Postfach 15 11 50			Phone: +49 681 302 5618
66041 Saarbruecken, Germany		Fax:   +49 681 302 5615
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