Nick Coghlan wrote:
On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Benjamin Peterson <benja...@python.org> wrote:
Open questions
==============
There are two open questions for this PEP:
* Should ``list`` expose a kwarg in it's constructor for supplying a length
hint.
* Should a function be added either to ``builtins`` or some other module which
calls ``__length_hint__``, like ``builtins.len`` calls ``__len__``.
Let's try to keep this as limited as possible for a public API.
Length hints are very useful for *any* container implementation,
whether those containers are in the standard library or not. Just as
we exposed operator.index when __index__ was added, we should expose
an "operator.length_hint" function with the following semantics:
[...]
As given, length_hint gives no way of distinguishing between iterables and
non-iterables:
py> length_hint([])
0
py> length_hint(42)
0
nor does it give iterable objects a way to indicate that either they don't
know their length, or that they are infinite.
I suggest:
* object (and hence all other types that don't explicitly override it)
should have a __length_hint__ that raises TypeError;
* __length_hint__ should be allowed to return None to indicate "don't know"
or -1 to indicate "infinite".
Presumably anything that wishes to create a list or other sequence from an
object with a hint of -1 could then raise an exception immediately.
--
Steven
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