New Article: My Experience Porting Python Dateutil's Date Parser to D

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 10 March 2016 at 17:59:21 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
> It's a little easier to write iterators in the Python style: 
> you don't have to cache the current value, and you don't have 
> to have a separate check for end-of-iteration. It's a little 
> easier to use them in the D style: you get more flexibility, 
> can check for emptiness without popping an item, and can grab 
> the first item several times.

I don't have any firm opinions on this, but escaping out of the 
loop with an exception means you don't have to check for 
emptiness. So I am not sure why D range-iterators should be 
considered  easier.

> You can convert one to the other, so there's no theoretical 
> difference in what you can accomplish with them. It's mainly 
> annoying. A small efficiency concern, because throwing 
> exceptions is a little slow.

Efficiency of exceptions in Python is an implementation issue, 
though. But I agree that the difference isn't all that 
interesting.

> The largest practical difference comes when multiple functions 
> are interested in viewing the first item in the same range. 
> LL(1) parsers need to do this.

Iterators and generators in Python are mostly for for-loops and 
comprehensions. In the rare case where you want lookahead you can 
just write your own or use an adapter.

> Of course, that's just looking at input ranges versus 
> iterators. If you look at other types of ranges, there's a lot 
> there that Python is missing.

Is there any work done on range-iterators and streams?