Raymond Hettinger added the comment: The wold "iterable" just means "can be looped over". There are many ways to implement this capability (two-arg form of iter(), the __iter__ method, generators, __getitem__ with integer indexing, etc).
collections.abc.Iterable is more limited and that is okay. There is nothing that compels us to break an API has been around and successful for 26+ years. That clearly wasn't Guido's intention when he added collections.abc.Iterable which is just a building block for more complex ABCs. I recommend closing this. We're not going to kill a useful API and break tons of code because of an overly pedantic reading of what is allowed to be iterable. However we can make a minor amendment to the glossary entry to mention that there are multiple ways of becoming iterable. Stephen, the try/except is a reasonable way to recognize an iterable. The ABCs are intended to recognize only things that implement a particular implementation or that are registered. It is not more encompassing or normative than that. ---------- assignee: docs@python -> rhettinger nosy: +rhettinger versions: +Python 3.7 -Python 3.3, Python 3.4 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue18558> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
