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can Python be useful as functional?

Duncan Booth duncan.booth at invalid.invalid
Tue Sep 18 03:41:03 EDT 2007 
"Rustom Mody" <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 9/18/07, Alex Martelli <aleax at mac.com> wrote:
>> Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Can someone help? Heres the non-working code
>> >
>> > def si(l):
>> >     p = l.next()
>> >     yield p
>> >     (x for x in si(l) if x % p != 0)
>> >
>> > There should be an yield or return somewhere but cant figure it out
>>
>> Change last line to
>>
>>     for x in (x for x in si(l) if x % p != 0): yield x
> 
> 
> Thanks but why does
> 
> (yield(x) for x in si(l) if x % p != 0)
> 
> not work? I would have expected generator expression to play better
> with generators.

Why should it? It evaluates the expression which returns an object that 
just happens to be a generator and then as with any other expression 
that isn't assigned or returned it throws away the result.

> More generally, if one wants to 'splice in' a generator into the body
> of a generator, is there no standard pythonic idiom?

Yes there is, as Alex showed you the standard python idiom for a 
generator to yield all elements of an iteratable (whether it is a 
generator or any other iterable) is:

    for somevar in iterable: yield somevar

There have been various proposals in the past such as 'yield from 
iterable', but there doesn't seem any compelling case to introduce a new 
confusing syntax: the existing syntax works, and adding a special syntax 
wouldn't open the door to any performance benefits since the 
implementation would have to be pretty much the same (at most you would 
save a couple of local variable accesses).
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