Improve SeqIter documentation

[turepalsson]

BPO	46095
Nosy	@rhettinger, @merwok, @miss-islington
PRs	bpo-46095: Improve SeqIter documentation. #30316 [3.10] bpo-46095: Improve SeqIter documentation. (GH-30316) #30330

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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GitHub fields:

assignee = 'https://github.com/rhettinger'
closed_at = <Date 2022-01-01.18:38:20.751>
created_at = <Date 2021-12-16.09:48:01.177>
labels = ['3.11', '3.10', 'docs']
title = 'Improve SeqIter documentation'
updated_at = <Date 2022-01-01.19:12:51.252>
user = 'https://bugs.python.org/turepalsson'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2022-01-01.19:12:51.252>
actor = 'rhettinger'
assignee = 'rhettinger'
closed = True
closed_date = <Date 2022-01-01.18:38:20.751>
closer = 'rhettinger'
components = ['Documentation']
creation = <Date 2021-12-16.09:48:01.177>
creator = 'turepalsson'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 46095
keywords = ['patch']
message_count = 5.0
messages = ['408680', '408808', '408832', '409469', '409473']
nosy_count = 5.0
nosy_names = ['rhettinger', 'eric.araujo', 'docs@python', 'miss-islington', 'turepalsson']
pr_nums = ['30316', '30330']
priority = 'normal'
resolution = 'fixed'
stage = 'resolved'
status = 'closed'
superseder = None
type = None
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue46095'
versions = ['Python 3.10', 'Python 3.11']

[turepalsson]

The language reference about the 'for' statement (https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#the-for-statement) has a "Note" box that states that the for statement uses an "internal counter" which is "incremented", and goes into detail about what happens when modifications happen before or after the current loop position. Surely this depends on the underlying iterator? For example, with a balanced tree an insert or a delete could completely re-jigger the tree with hard-to-predict results on an iterator.

[merwok]

The note does say it’s about mutable sequences like lists.

[rhettinger]

I think this note can be removed. The tutorial now has coverage of mutating while iterating. That is the correct place for discussion of looping techniques.

The part about the "internal counter" needs to be rewritten and moved to stdtypes.rst section on Sequence types. Here is a first draft:

"Forward and reversed iterators over sequences access values using an index. That index will continue to march forward (or backward) even if the underlying sequence is mutated. The iterator terminates only when an IndexError or StopIteration is encountered (or when the index drops below zero)."

Sequence iterators are roughly equivalent to:

    def seqiter(seq):
        i = 0
        while True:
            try:
                yield seq[i]
            except (IndexError, StopIteration):
                break
            i += 1

[rhettinger]

New changeset a09bc3a by Raymond Hettinger in branch 'main':
bpo-46095: Improve SeqIter documentation. (GH-30316)
a09bc3a

[rhettinger]

New changeset e9783d6 by Miss Islington (bot) in branch '3.10':
bpo-46095: Improve SeqIter documentation. (GH-30316) (GH-30330)
e9783d6