Pythonic way to iterate through multidimensional space?

[Gelonida N]

On 10/7/2014 1:01 PM, Ned Batchelder wrote:
> On 10/7/14 2:10 AM, Gelonida N wrote:
>>
>> Disadvantage of itertools.product() is, that it makes a copy in memory.
>> Reason ist, that itertools also makes products of generators (meaning of
>> objects, that one can't iterate several times through)
>>
>>
>> There are two use cases, that I occasionaly stumble over:
>>
>> One is making the product over lists(),
>> product( list_of_lists )
>>
>> ex:
>>
>> product( [ [1,2,3], ['A','B'], ['a', 'b', 'c'] ] )
>>
>> the other one making a product over a list of functions, which will
>> create generators
>>
>> ex:
>> product( [ lambda: [ 'A', 'B' ], lambda: xrange(3) ] )
>>
>>
>> I personally would also be interested in a fast generic solution that
>> can iterate through an N-dimensional array and which does not duplicate
>> the memory or iterate through a list of generator-factories or however
>> this would be called.
>
> itertools.product makes a copy of the sequences passed in, but it is a
> shallow copy. It doesn't copy the objects in the sequences.  It also
> doesn't store the entire product.
>
> If you are calling product(j, k, l, m, n), where len(j)==J, the extra
> memory is J+K+L+M+N, which is much smaller than the number of iterations
> product will produce.  Are you sure that much extra memory use is a
> problem?  How large are your lists that you are product'ing together?
>

Thanks for the clarification.

You are right. Consumption of a shallow copy of each iterator, should 
not be a problem in the cases that I encountered so far.


> I don't understand your point about a list of functions that create
> generators?  What is the problem there?
>
The idea was to even avoid the creation of a shallow copy, by having a 
function, that will return the same generator over and over again (thus 
no need for shallow copy)