On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 02:56:29PM -0500, Terry Reedy wrote:
> >3) using a while loop in code dealing with iterables,
>
> I agree that this is not necessary, and give a replacement below.
The OP isn't just saying that its unnecessary in this case, but that its
unPythonic to ever use a while loop in code dealing with iterables. I
disagree with that stronger statement.
> >def roundrobin(*iters):
> > "roundrobin('ABC', 'D', 'EF') --> A D E B F C"
> > # Perhaps "flat_zip_nofill" is a better name, or something similar
> > sentinel = object()
> > for tup in it.zip_longest(*iters, fillvalue=sentinel):
> > yield from (x for x in tup if x is not sentinel)
>
> This adds and then deletes grouping and fill values that are not wanted.
> To me, this is an 'algorithm smell'. One of the principles of
> algorithm design is to avoid unnecessary calculations. For an edge case
> such as roundrobin(1000000*'a', ''), the above mostly does unnecessary work.
Its a recipe, not a tuned and optimized piece of production code.
And if you're going to criticise code on the basis of efficiency, then I
would hope you've actually profiled the code first. Because it isn't
clear to me at all that what you call "unnecessary work" is more
expensive than re-writing the recipe using a more complex algorithm with
calls to cycle and islice.
But I'm not here to nit-pick your recipe over the earlier ones.
[...]
> Since I have a competing 'improvement', I would hold off on a PR until
> Raymond Hettinger, the itertools author, comments.
Raise a doc issue on the tracker, and take the discussion there. I think
that this is too minor an issue to need long argument on the list.
Besides, it's not really on-topic as such -- it isn't about a change to
the language. Its about an implementation change to a recipe in the
docs.
--
Steve
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