[Python-ideas] Possible PEP 380 tweak

[Greg Ewing]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

> A different approach to fixing this is for the throwing code to keep
> throwing EOFError until the generator stops yielding values:

That's precisely what I would recommend.

> This solution doesn't quite work though, because the count returned
> will include the nodes that were yielded while the stack of generators
> was winding down.
 >
 > My pragmatic solution for this is to change the
> protocol so that stopping the generator means that the node yielded
> last should not be included in the count.

This whole example seems contrived to me, so it's hard to
say whether this is a good or bad solution.

> I propose to
> modify g.close() to keep throwing GeneratorExit until the generator
> stops yielding values, and then capture the return value from
> StopIteration if that is what was raised. The beauty is then that the
> PEP 380 expansion can stop special-casing GeneratorExit: it just
> treats it as every other exception.

This was actually suggested during the initial round of
discussion, and shot down -- if I remember correctly, on the
grounds that it could result in infinite loops. But if you're
no longer concerned about that, it's worth considering.

My concern is that this would be a fairly substantial change
to the intended semantics of close() -- it would no longer be
a way of aborting a generator and forcing it to clean up as
quickly as possible.

But maybe you don't mind losing that functionality?

-- 
Greg