New submission from Azaria Zornberg <a.zornber...@gmail.com>:

When an asynchronous coroutine in asyncio awaits or yields from itself, any 
call to the function is executed somewhat synchronously.

Once the recursive coroutine begins, if it never awaits any other coroutines 
besides itself, nothing else will be scheduled to run until it has completely 
finished recursively calling itself and returning.
However, if it ever awaits a different coroutine (even something as small as 
asyncio.sleep(0)) then other coroutines will be scheduled to run.

It seems, from other documentation, that this is intentional. Other 
documentation sort of dances around the specifics of how coroutines work with 
recursion, and only examples of coroutines yielding from each other recursively 
are provided.

However, this behavior is never explicitly called out. This is confusing for 
people who write a recursive asyncio coroutine and are perplexed by why it 
seems to execute synchronously, assuming they ever notice.

I've attached a short script that can be run to exhibit the behavior.
A PR is going to be filed shortly against the python 3.7 branch (as the 
documentation page for asyncio in 3.8 does not fully exist right now).

----------
assignee: docs@python
components: Documentation, asyncio
files: asyncio_await_from_self_example.py
messages: 325468
nosy: asvetlov, azaria.zornberg, docs@python, yselivanov
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Asyncio documentation for recursive coroutines is lacking
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.4, Python 3.5, Python 3.6, Python 3.7
Added file: https://bugs.python.org/file47805/asyncio_await_from_self_example.py

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue34701>
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