[docs] [issue18558] Iterable glossary entry needs clarification

[Vedran Čačić]

Vedran Čačić added the comment:

Yes, the mapping/sequence distinction was (at least declaratively) the reason the ABCs were introduced, but that isn't an obstacle here: whether a mapping or a sequence, it _is_ iterable, right?

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In case anybody is interested, here's how I came to this problem: at a programming competition, I set a problem where contestants had to write some function, and I declared that "the function must work for arbitrary iterable (with some properties that currently don't matter)".

Then a big discussion ensued, with a big group of people thinking that classes with __getitem__ but no __iter__ don't quality (giving collections.abc.Iterable as an argument), and another big group of people thinking they do (giving EAFP as an argument: "look, I tried iterating, and succeeded").

Of course, it's an incredibly technical detail, but I don't like such gray areas. To me, things with __getitem__ are clearly iterable - the glossary says so:-). Iterable's instancecheck is simply buggy ("incomplete", if you want). There might be valid reasons for keeping it buggy, but they should be documented.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue18558>
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