List Comprehensions Are For Lists

List comprehensions in Python are a great way of expressing a list but, as the name suggests, they are for lists and not purely for iterating over an iterable and calling some method.

If you find yourself writing:

[obj.some_method() for obj in my_objects]

then you actually intended to write:

for obj in my_objects:
    obj.some_method()

I know, the first is a one-liner which feels exotic compared to an old-school for loop.

But the second version expresses what you want to do: call a method on each object and ignore the return value of that method. In the first version you're constructing a list, storing the return values and then forgetting about the list altogether because you're not assigning to a variable.

In CPython 3.3 both cases produce similar bytecode but a list is still constructed unneccessarily. Given that Python is designed for readability the second one expresses better what you're doing. If you do need to store the return values in a list then you can rewrite the code later.

Similarly, the same argument applies to the following construct:

map(lambda obj: obj.some_method(), my_objects)

If you need the constructed list of return values then you can rewrite it as a list comprehension. If you don't need the list then you can rewrite it as a for loop.