Notes on generators, yield expressions, and order of execution

I was messing around with the use of yield as an expression, the new feature in Python 2.5, and I got a little tripped in small cases of order with how you need to iterate over the generator and when you call send(), etc. I just thought I would post this example to make anyone passively reading aware of the ordering.


>>> def g():
...     print 1
...     print 2, (yield)
...     print 3
...
>>> gen = g()
>>> gen.next()
1
2
>>> gen.send(0)
0
3
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
StopIteration
>>>

Comments

Jack Diederich said…

Each of the print arguments is evaluated left-to-right just before they are needed. If you think of the '(yield)' as '(yield(None))' it might read easier [NB: those extra parens are just grouping and not a function call!]

Here's a similar situation using functions instead:

>>> def a():
... print "A",
... return "ret_A"
...
>>> def b():
... print "B",
... return "ret_B"
...
>>> print 1, a(), 2, b(), 3
1 A ret_A 2 B ret_B 3

2:48 PM

Anonymous said…

WOW, so when they said generators halt evaluation at yield, they REALLY mean it!

2:57 PM

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