Before the patch a lot of internal types weren't available in the header files. The patch exposes the new iterators, views and some other types to all C modules. I've also renamed some of the types and tp_names.
sees it (test_iter.py is unchanged).
- Added a tp_iternext slot, which calls the iterator's next() method;
this is much faster for built-in iterators over built-in types
such as lists and dicts, speeding up pybench's ForLoop with about
25% compared to Python 2.1. (Now there's a good argument for
iterators. ;-)
- Renamed the built-in sequence iterator SeqIter, affecting the C API
functions for it. (This frees up the PyIter prefix for generic
iterator operations.)
- Added PyIter_Check(obj), which checks that obj's type has a
tp_iternext slot and that the proper feature flag is set.
- Added PyIter_Next(obj) which calls the tp_iternext slot. It has a
somewhat complex return condition due to the need for speed: when it
returns NULL, it may not have set an exception condition, meaning
the iterator is exhausted; when the exception StopIteration is set
(or a derived exception class), it means the same thing; any other
exception means some other error occurred.
Raymond Hettinger
Christian Heimes
Martin v. Löwis
Guido van Rossum
Mark Hammond