On Monday, 9 January 2017 03:53:37 UTC, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Suppose you have an expensive calculation that gets used two or more times
> in a loop.
[...]
> [(tmp, tmp + 1) for x in data for tmp in [expensive_calculation(x)]]
>
> I can't decide whether that's an awesome trick or a horrible hack...
My immediate reaction is that it depends on the constraints that made it
important for you to use a comprehension rather than an explicit loop in the
first place.
For a toy example like this it's obviously a horrible hack, and you should
simply make an explicit loop:
result = []
for x in data:
# Don't recalculate this value, as it's expensive!
val = expensive_calculation(x)
result.append((val, val+1))
In a real world case, maybe there's a good reason why you'd prefer to stick
with a comprehension. In that case, you look at trade-offs like
def intermediate_tuple(val): return val, val+1
[intermediate_tuple(x) for x in data]
or
[(lambda val: (val, val+1))(x) for x in data]
or your version.
All have their own unique uglinesses, as does the explicit loop. Personally my
preferences would be the explicit loop, then the intermediate_tuple function,
in that order.
Paul
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