Re: Iterators in Ada2012

["R. Tyler Croy" <tyler@linux.com>]

On Wed, 09 Nov 2011 09:02:38 +0000, Simon Wright wrote:

> "R. Tyler Croy" <tyler@linux.com> writes:
> 
>> The reasons things like list comprehensions and generator expressions
>> are recommended in Python is because they're faster in the CPython
>> implementation of the language since they get to native C "faster"
>> (with less interpretation and bytecode).
> 
> I had no idea that list comprehensions were faster (I have no idea
> whether Mac OS X's native Python is a CPython implementation!), I used
> them because they are so expressive!

(I'm aware this is off-topic for comp.lang.ada :))

Pretty much any time you're using Python, you're using the CPython 
implementation. The other options (Jython (java), IronPython (C#), PyPy 
(Python self-hosting)) are less used because they lag behind CPython or 
they have other issues.

That said, yes, list comprehensions are certainly expressive! Having spend 
some time in Ruby lately, I'm not sure which I like more, the list 
comprehension pattern or Ruby's block-based syntax, e.g:

    some_collection.each do |item|
        item.do_thing
    end

vs.

  [item.do_thing() for item in some_collection]

While semantically they're the same thing, there's more one can do in the 
block the Ruby option provides compared to the comprehension approach.



Different strokes for different folks :)



-- 
- R. Tyler Croy
--------------------------------------
    Code: http://github.com/rtyler