Pre-PEP: reverse iteration methods

[David Eppstein]

In article <mailman.1064453195.20358.python-list at python.org>,
 Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:

> David Eppstein <eppstein at ics.uci.edu> wrote previously:
> |It would be quite cumbersome to have to identify simple generators as
> |infinite or finite manually, and impossible (halting problem) to do so
> |reliably automatically.
> 
> Humans cannot solve the halting problem either, FWIW.  Just because a
> programmer THINKS an iterator is finite, it don't mean it is!

Well, true, but if you are a programmer and don't know whether your 
program is always going to halt, you probably shouldn't have written it 
that way.

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science