[swift-users] Generators vs. errors

[davesweeris at mac.com]

I think I’d either just end the sequence on an error, or do like you were thinking and have a function/computed property that gives an array containing all the rows which had an error or something.

I’m not a DB guy, though.

- Dave Sweeris

> On Apr 12, 2016, at 1:53 PM, Jens Alfke via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> What should one do, when implementing a Generator, if the underlying data source can experience errors? Generator.next isn’t allowed to throw, only to return nil at the end of the sequence.
> 
> The only idea I can think of is to add an `error` property to my Generator implementation, and request that the caller check it after the iteration ends, and/or a `checkForError()` method that can throw an error if there is one:
> 	var q: Query = db.query(…)
> 	for (row in q) { … }
> 	q.checkForError()
> 
> As the example implies, this problem comes up when creating Swift bindings for database iterators/cursors. Generator is the obvious protocol to implement, especially since without it you don’t get the idiomatic for/in loop, but the `next` method does have to hit the database, so it has the possibility of I/O errors.
> 
> Another possibility is to do all the failable database work up front in the `query` method that creates the Generator, but this means all the results have to be cached in memory, which isn’t scaleable. (Keep in mind I work for a database company <http://couchbase.com/> whose customers often have multi-terabyte data sets.)
> 
> I know there’s been a proposal (by Brent Royal-Gordon) to allow property accessors and subscripts to throw, which I strongly endorse, but I think we also need to allow Generators to throw. Fodder for the swift-evolution list…
> 
> —Jens
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