W1D2

Yesterday was a little challenging trying to keep up during probably my first ever pair programming. But it reminded me why I am here and that is to get better at programming. Finished writing the rest of the game (v barebone) in python and played around with writing the games w functions vs a class object and playing around with different implementations of generators.

Generator snippets below..

Method 1: Generator decides when to stop. The for loop just eats StopIteration.

for board in conway.play(2):
    time.sleep(0.5)

Output: 
pre-yield - count 1
2026-02-18 10:30:00.123456
[loop body runs - sleep 0.5s]
post-yield - count 1
2026-02-18 10:30:00.623456
i am simulating!!!!
2026-02-18 10:30:00.623789
pre-yield - count 2
2026-02-18 10:30:00.624012
[loop body runs - sleep 0.5s]
post-yield - count 2
2026-02-18 10:30:01.124012
i am simulating!!!!
2026-02-18 10:30:01.124345
[generator exits, StopIteration caught by for-loop]

Method 2: Same as Method 1, but I explicitly call next() and catch the exception. Same thing the for-loop does under the hood.

conway_board_generator = conway.play(2)
while True:
    try:
        current_board = next(conway_board_generator)
        time.sleep(0.5)
    except StopIteration as e:
        print("done iterating")
        break

Method 3: Here I control how many times I call next(). So the iteration count lives in the loop, not in the generator.

conway_board_generator = conway.play(2)
for _ in range(2):
    time.sleep(0.5)
    current_board = next(conway_board_generator)
    time.sleep(0.5)

Output:

pre-yield - count 1
2026-02-18 10:30:00.123456
[sleep 0.5s]
[sleep 0.5s]
post-yield - count 1
2026-02-18 10:30:01.123456
i am simulating!!!!
2026-02-18 10:30:01.123789
pre-yield - count 2
2026-02-18 10:30:01.124012
[range(2) ends, loop exits]