Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By : Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham
Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By: Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham

Overview of this book

Experienced programmers want to know how to enhance their craft and we want to help them start as apprentices with Python. We know that before mastering Python you need to learn the culture and the tools to become a productive member of any Python project. Our goal with this book is to give you a practical and thorough introduction to Python programming, providing you with the insight and technical craftsmanship you need to be a productive member of any Python project. Python is a big language, and it’s not our intention with this book to cover everything there is to know. We just want to make sure that you, as the developer, know the tools, basic idioms and of course the ins and outs of the language, the standard library and other modules to be able to jump into most projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
12
Afterword – Just the Beginning

Generator expressions


Generator expressions are a cross between comprehensions and generator functions. They use a similar syntax as comprehensions, but they result in the creation of a generator object which produces the specified sequence lazily. The syntax for generator expressions is very similar to list comprehensions:

( expr(item) for item in iterable )

It is delimited by parentheses instead of the brackets used for list comprehensions.

Generator expressions are useful for situations where you want the lazy evaluation of generators with the declarative concision of comprehensions. For example, this generator expression yields a list of the first one-million square numbers:

>>> million_squares = (x*x for x in range(1, 1000001))

At this point, none of the squares have been created; we've just captured the specification of the sequence into a generator object:

>>> million_squares
<generator object <genexpr> at 0x1007a12d0>

We can force evaluation of the generator...