The Iterator Pattern
We've discussed how many of Python's built-ins and idioms seem, at first blush, to fly in the face of object-oriented principles, but are actually providing access to real objects under the hood. In this chapter, we'll discuss how the for loop, which seems so structured, is actually a lightweight wrapper around a set of object-oriented principles. We'll also see a variety of extensions to this syntax that automatically create even more types of object. We will cover the following topics:
- What design patterns are
- The iterator protocol – one of the most powerful design patterns
- List, set, and dictionary comprehensions
- Generator functions, and how they build on other patterns
The case study for this chapter will revisit the algorithms for partitioning sample data into testing and training subsets to see how the iterator design pattern applies to this part of the problem.
We'll...