Calling a generator multiple times

[Tim Peters]

[Steven Majewski]
> ...
>  And when you use these generators in a for loop, they two bits of
> confusion seem to cancel each other out. "for i in g(10):" really
> behaves just like it's definition.   I'm guessing that this fact
> was one of the selling points for this syntax -- that if you didn't
> look under the hood and just USED them, they would not be confusing.

Yes it was, just as the low-level details of __getitem__ and IndexError in
the pre-2.2 iteration protocol remain blissfully unknown to most Python
programmers.  The driving force in both cases was to make "for ... in ..."
work smooth as phlegm on a brass doorknob, despite that phlegm and brass
doorknobs aren't all that attractive in isolation <wink>.

> I'm not sure that supposition has been born out, but they do get
> less confusion with use.

All evidence to date says people learn how to use generators in the for-loop
context easily.  If they're going to use .next() explicitly, then they have
some conceptual work to do -- even if they're not mucking with generators.

>  Perhaps it would be better to spend another keyword, along with
> 'def' and 'class' , to distinguish 'generator factories'.

In practice, starting the docstring with "Generate ..." instead of "Return
..." is clear enough.

> ...
> Generators, functions and methods are just slight variations on each
> other.

Absolutely.  People should consider *all* callable objects in 2.2 to be
generators -- it's just that if the body doesn't contain "yield", then the
language helpfully calls .next() once for you by magic <wink>.