python / python/cpython

Documentation of ast.walk misleadingly characterizes its behavior as recursive when it's really iterative

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Description

Documentation

Although the documentation claims that ast.walk generates nodes "in no specified order" and even describes its behavior as "Recursively yield all descendant nodes...", a look at the source code reveals that it really performs a breadth-first traversal by iteratively yielding child nodes in a queue:

def walk(node):
    """
    Recursively yield all descendant nodes in the tree starting at *node*
    (including *node* itself), in no specified order.  This is useful if you
    only want to modify nodes in place and don't care about the context.
    """
    from collections import deque
    todo = deque([node])
    while todo:
        node = todo.popleft()
        todo.extend(iter_child_nodes(node))
        yield node

I thought that maybe this function used to be recursive but found that it has not been modified since its first appearance in CPython 2.6.3.

I think we should at the minimum remove the wording "Recursively" from the description, and optionally:

  1. Clarify the actual ordering by changing "in no specified order" to "in breadth-first order".
  2. Add a keyword argument such as depth_first that defaults to False such that when it is true, switches to a depth-first traversal that behaves like:
def dfs_walk(node):
    yield node
    for child in ast.iter_child_nodes(node):
        yield from dfs_walk(child)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the ast.walk documentation linked in the issue and compare its wording with the implementation in Lib/ast.py. Decide whether to make the minimum wording correction or also document breadth-first ordering; the documentation should accurately describe the existing behavior without adding an unrequested API change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

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