question about generators

[greg]

Tim Peters wrote:
> 
> There was a lot of discussion of this at the time (dig into the iterators
> mailing list archive).  We decided to keep Simple Generators, well,
> *simple*, to start with.

I don't agree with the characterisation of Python generators
as "simpler" than Icon ones (from the user's perspective).
There's a point of view from which Icon's generators are
simpler than Python's -- that is, the one Andrew Koenig
was adopting when he didn't immediately see the need for
the "for...yield" loop.

I predicted, at the time generators were introduced, that
some people would find this aspect of them unintuitive,
and it seems that I was right.

If by "simple" you're referring to the *implementation*,
then yes, it would have been much harder to add Icon-style
generators to CPython. (But only because the guts of CPython 
hadn't been designed with them in mind from the beginning
like Icon had.)

Greg Ewing