Re: Generators (iterators) for Gnu Emacs

[Michael Heerdegen]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>  A few comments below.

Thanks.  Still using the term "generator" to avoid confusion, though I'm
going to rename the thing to "iterator".

> It's great to see that you haven't needed anything else than `gen-next'.
> I'd have expected a `gen-done-p' test to be needed/handy every once in
> a while.

Dunno if that would be useful, I never missed it, but it should be
trivial to introduce.

> I guess a `gen-cons' would be more efficient than this 
> (gen-append (gen-from-elts value) ...).

I'm not sure implementing `gen-cons' is a good idea.  Generators are not
built from conses - but having `gen-cons' would allow to build generator
pseudo lists.  This package is about introducing a different concept.
Plus, using `gen-cons' as a building block of generators would create
deeply nested lambdas that would soon hit `max-lisp-eval-depth' when
requesting elements.  Avoiding recursion, which Emacs is not good at, is
crucial allover in this package.

Pushing to generators should not be needed repeatedly - if you think you
want this, use lists.  In the above case, it is just coincidence that
the first generator has only one element. And I don't think efficiency
is an issue here.  If you think it is I will rewrite that code, but
avoiding a `gen-cons'.

> > (defmacro gen-delay-expr (expression)
>
> Have you made use of this?  I'm not sure it really fits.  I mean,
> technically it works, but I'm not completely sure if pretending it's
> a generator is a clever idea or not.

I defined it because I need it in `gen-cache', and because it wasn't
existing yet in Emacs.  Do you think delay-expression should be defined
somewhere else in Emacs?  Then I would be happy to use it for
`gen-cache'.


Thanks,

Michael.