Prime number generator

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:00:59 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> And now for something completely different.
> 
> I knocked together a prime number generator, just for the fun of it,
> that works like a Sieve of Eratosthenes but unbounded.
[...]
> So, a few questions. Firstly, is there a stdlib way to find the key with
> the lowest corresponding value? In the above map, it would return 3,
> because 18 is the lowest value in the list. 

Not from a dict, but with a list you would probably use the bisect module.


> I want to do this with a
> single pass over the dictionary. Secondly, can the "while i<smallest...
> i+=1" loop become a for...range? It's almost asking for it, but not
> quite there. Thirdly, is there any sort of half-sane benchmark that I
> can compare this code to? And finally, whose wheel did I reinvent here?
> What name would this algorithm have?

I can't directly answer that question, but I can make a shameless plug 
for this:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyprimes

If your prime generator performs better than, or worse than, all of those 
in the above module, I may have to steal it from you :-)



-- 
Steven