In one of his talks at PyCon, Alex Martelli said that if you have complicated loop logic, throw it into a generator so that you never have to duplicate it. In the old days, it was common to duplicate loop logic. I like this rule, and I have seen it improve my code. Just in case you haven't seen the syntax yet, it's: >>> def generate(): ... yield 1 ... yield 79 ... yield 26 ... for i in range(0, 10): ... yield i ... >>> for i in generate(): ... print i, ... 1 79 26 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 In Python 2.4, generator expressions were added. When I saw these, I figured, "Well, yeah, that's pretty natural." It took me a while to realize that just as list comprehensions were taken from Haskell, generator expressions are lazy lists from Haskell. Again, here's an example: >>> import itertools >>> import random >>> >>> numbers = (random.random() for i in itertools.repeat(0)) >>>
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