Conjoin function made in functional style

Question

Recently, reading Python \"Functional Programming HOWTO\", I came across a mentioned there test_generators.py standard module, where I found the following gener

Answer 1

This seems to work, and it's still lazy:

def conjoin(gs):
    return [()] if not gs else (
        (val,) + suffix for val in gs[0]() for suffix in conjoin(gs[1:])
    )

def range3():
    return range(3)

print list(conjoin([range3, range3]))

Output:

[(0, 0), (0, 1), (0, 2), (1, 0), (1, 1), (1, 2), (2, 0), (2, 1), (2, 2)]

Example usage to show mutable state:

x = ""
def mutablerange():
    global x
    x += "x"
    return [x + str(i) for i in range(3)]

print list(conjoin([range3, mutablerange]))

Output: (watch the increasing number of 'x's)

[(0, 'x0'), (0, 'x1'), (0, 'x2'), (1, 'xx0'), (1, 'xx1'), (1, 'xx2'), (2, 'xxx0'), (2, 'xxx1'), (2, 'xxx2')]

And if we use itertools.product:

x = ""
print list(itertools.product(range3(), mutablerange()))

the result is the following:

[(0, 'x0'), (0, 'x1'), (0, 'x2'), (1, 'x0'), (1, 'x1'), (1, 'x2'), (2, 'x0'), (2, 'x1'), (2, 'x2')]

So, one clearly see, that itertools.product caches the values returned by the iterator.