[issue18558] Iterable glossary entry needs clarification

[Terry J. Reedy]

Terry J. Reedy added the comment:

Stephen, your class, or rather instances thereof when initialized with a sequence, follow the old iteration protocol. You might call them iterators in the generic sense, though I cannot remember whether we used 'iterator' much before the introduction of the new and now dominant iteration protocol. I am sure 'iterable' was introduced with the new protocol for objects with .__iter__ methods that return iterators, which in this context means an object with a .__next__ method and excludes .__getitem__ objects.

It would have been less confusing is we had disabled the old protocol in 3.0, but aside from the predictable confusion, it seemed better to keep it.

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nosy: +terry.reedy

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