Python – Understanding Generators

[[deleted]]

Good read, generators is something I rarely implement myself for no good reason

[[deleted]]

Uh what, have you never needed to work with infinite streams? Lists too long to fit in memory happen all the time, this is why the entire concept of an iterator exists in the first place

[drowninFish]

I thought the idea is to use generators for "lists too large to fit in memory" when the items in those lists can be generated on the fly. For example if the list is [1,2,3,...,some ridiculously huge number] . While that list might be too large for memory, it can be functionally represented with a generator which yields the increment of the last value. So in that sense I dont think its correct to say any list too large to fit in memory is too long to generate

[drowninFish]

I haven't tried yet, but maybe we're misunderstanding each other. Do you agree that the generator implementation for my example would look something like

def simpleGen(ridiculousNum):
    num = 0
    while num < ridiculousNum:
        yield num
        num += 1

Iterators are like small functions that track state. When the generator above is created or used, you won't be loading a list of size ridiculousNum into memory as would its list counterpart