Question

I am studying coroutines and generators in various programming languages.

I was wondering if there is a cleaner way to combine together two coroutines implemented via generators than yielding back at the caller whatever the callee yields?

Let’s say that we are using the following convention: all yields apart from the last one return null, while the last one returns the result of the coroutine. So, for example, we could have a coroutine that invokes another:

def A():
  # yield until a certain condition is met
  yield result

def B():
  # do something that may or may not yield
  x = bind(A())
  # ...
  return result

in this case I wish that through bind (which may or may not be implementable, that’s the question) the coroutine B yields whenever A yields until A returns its final result, which is then assigned to x allowing B to continue.

I suspect that the actual code should explicitly iterate A so:

def B():
  # do something that may or may not yield
  for x in A(): ()
  # ...
  return result

which is a tad ugly and error prone…

PS: it’s for a game where the users of the language will be the designers who write scripts (script = coroutine). Each character has an associated script, and there are many sub-scripts which are invoked by the main script; consider that, for example, run_ship invokes many times reach_closest_enemy, fight_with_closest_enemy, flee_to_allies, and so on. All these sub-scripts need to be invoked the way you describe above; for a developer this is not a problem, but for a designer the less code they have to write the better!

Answer 1

Are you looking for something like this?

def B():
   for x in A():
     if x is None:
       yield
     else:
       break

   # continue, x contains value A yielded