How to parse this line of code manually

[Dustan]

On Aug 28, 2:59 am, "A.T.Hofkamp" <h... at se-162.se.wtb.tue.nl> wrote:
> On 2007-08-28, Davy <zhushe... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Aug 28, 11:00 am, Davy <zhushe... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hi all,
>
> >> It is well known that Python is appreciated for its merit of concise.
> >> However, I found the over concise code is too hard to understand for
> >> me.
>
> >> Consider, for instance,
> >> def known_edits2(word):
> >>     return set(e2 for e1 in edits1(word) for e2 in edits1(e1) if e2 in
> >> NWORDS)
>
> >> Shall I understand the code in set() as
> >> for e2 in edits1(e1) {
> >>     if e2 in NWORDS {
> >>         for e1 in edits1(word) {
> >>              e2
> >>         }
> >>     }
>
> >> }
>
> > [SNIP]
> > Hi all, I figured it myself. It is left to righ parse, right?
> > So the above one is like
> > for e1 in edits1(word) {
> >     for e2 in edits1(e1) {
> >         if e2 in NWORDS {
> >             push e2 to set
> >         }
> >     }
> > }
>
> This is correct, although I am not sure what language you are using here, it
> looks like a strange mix of Python and C to me.
>
> >> Any suggestions are welcome!
>
> The idea is known as List comprehension (for lists, obviously), and comes from
> functional programming, Bird & Wadler used it in their book.
>
> The notation is very close to mathematics:
>
>  { e2 | e1: edits(word), e2: edits(e1) in NWORDS }
>
> or in LaTeX:
>
> $\{ e_2 | \forall e_1: \mathrm{edits}(\mathrm{words}),
>           \forall e_2: \mathrm{edits}(e_1) \in \mathrm{NWORDS} \}$
>
> :-)
>
> (which in words is something like: collect values e2, where e1 comes from
> 'edits(word)', e2 comes from 'edits(e1)', and e2 in NWORDS)
>

For more examples:
http://docs.python.org/tut/node7.html#SECTION007140000000000000000

A 'list comprehension' with parentheses instead of square-brackets
creates a generator instead of a list, which can be more memory-
efficient and allows for lazy evaluation.