Should I return iterators or more sophisticated objects?

Question

Say I have a function that creates a list of objects. If I want to return an iterator, I'll have to return iter(a_list). Should I do this, or just return the list as it is? My motivation for returning an iterator is that this would keep the interface smaller -- what kind of container I create to collect the objects is essentially an implementation detail

On the other hand, it would be wasteful if the user of my function may have to recreate the same container from the iterator which would be bad for performance.

Answer 1

Return the list itself. That's quite efficient (since a copy is not made). If the caller wants an iterator, it can always call iter().

The fact that your interface returns a particular type of object isn't really a big deal in Python; duck typing often makes the exact types of objects unimportant.

Answer 2

Unless you have the need to traverse the list multiple times, I'd most likely you a generator. As a personal preference, I tend to favor generators to lists as the entire list is not maintained in memory. Of course, if you're not dealing with a large volume of data, it wouldn't really matter which way you go.

Answer 3

It seems like returning an iterator only makes sense if the underlying collection should not be modified or queried any other way, and you don't want the underlying collection to be iterated over multiple times with out the caller getting a new iterator. I might be missing some finer points of Python, though, as I am thinking about this in terms of Java's iterators.