On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Peter Moody <pmo...@google.com> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:55 PM, Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> wrote: >> On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Ethan Furman <et...@stoneleaf.us> wrote: >>> Nick Coghlan wrote: >>>> >>>> Collapsing the address list has to build the result list anyway to >>>> actually handle the deduplication part of its job, so returning a >>>> concrete list makes sense in that case. >>> >>> >>> Having only one function return a list instead of an iterator seems >>> questionable. >>> >>> Depending on the code it could either keep track of what it has returned so >>> far in a set and avoid duplication that way; or, just return an >>> `iter(listobject)` instead of `listobject`. >> >> I know I'm lacking context, but is the list ever expected to be huge? >> If not, what's wrong with always returning a list? > > It's possible to return massive lists, (eg, returning the 4+ billion > /128 subnets in /96 or something even larger, but I don't think that's > very common). I've generally tried to avoid confusion by having 'iter' > in the iterating methods, but if more of the methods return iterators, > maybe I need to rethink that?
I personally like having 'iter' in the name (e.g. iterkeys() -- note that we dropped this in Py3k because it's no longer an iterator, it's a dict view now. But I don't want to promote that style for ipaddr.py. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
