[gt-users] python iterators

[Sascha Steinbiss]

Hi Brent,

> hi, i've been looking at the python iterators and realized that the
> iterating over featurenodes is not very idiomatic.

This may be true, but we also wanted to preserve interface consistency
across the supported programming languages, so at first we did not put
much effort into fiting the interface to any specific language idioms.
Of course, they are very nice to have anyway ;)

> this is easily fixed by the patch below. it allows:
> 
> for feat in FeatureNodeIteratorDepthFirst(node):
>      print feat.type

This is much more concise. However, in my opinion, it would be cleaner
to have a traverse() iterator in the FeatureNodeIterator* classes:

dfi = FeatureNodeIteratorDepthFirst(node)
for feat in dfi.traverse():
  print feat

This allows the iterator class to be more backward compatible, with no
iteration happening inside the constructor, while still having the
iterator functionality if you want it:

for feat in FeatureNodeIteratorDepthFirst(node).traverse():
  print feat

What do you think?

> -brent

Sascha

-- 
Sascha Steinbiss
Center for Bioinformatics
University of Hamburg
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20146 Hamburg
Germany

Email:  steinbiss at zbh.uni-hamburg.de
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