[issue40230] Itertools.product() Out of Memory Errors

[Tim Peters]

Tim Peters <tim at python.org> added the comment:

Henry, I have to ask again:  please give at least one specific, concrete example of the behavior you're objecting to.  English isn't helping, and I still have no idea what your complaint is.

What I'm looking for:

    for i in itertools.product(???):
        pass
 
where you replace the ??? with executable code (preferably not using numpy or any other extension package) that provokes the MemoryError you're talking about.

For example, here I'm constructing a case with a million arguments.  There's no problem at all:

>>> import itertools
>>> args = [range(100) for i in range(1_000_000)]
>>> for i in itertools.product(*args):
...     print(len(i))
[and it prints 1000000 over & over until I get bored and kill it]

Note if it _did_ provoke a problem, we probably wouldn't care - there are no plausible realistic use cases for passing a million arguments to product().

You haven't given us a way to reproduce your complaint, or even a clue as to the number of arguments you're talking about.  The above code was my best guess as to what you _might_ be talking about.  But since there's no MemoryError in sight, apparently not.

I'm suspecting this may be an XY problem[1], and especially because you posted "a solution" instead of an actual problem ;-)

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue40230>
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