It's returning a generator. I'm not particularly familiar with Python, but I believe it's the same kind of thing as C#'s iterator blocks if you're familiar with those.

There's an IBM article which explains it reasonably well (for Python) as far as I can see.

The key idea is that the compiler/interpreter/whatever does some trickery so that as far as the caller is concerned, they can keep calling next() and it will keep returning values - as if the generator method was paused. Now obviously you can't really "pause" a method, so the compiler builds a state machine for you to remember where you currently are and what the local variables etc look like. This is much easier than writing an iterator yourself.

It's returning a generator. I'm not particularly familiar with Python, but I believe it's the same kind of thing as C#'s iterator blocks if you're familiar with those.

The key idea is that the compiler/interpreter/whatever does some trickery so that as far as the caller is concerned, they can keep calling next() and it will keep returning values - as if the generator method was paused. Now obviously you can't really "pause" a method, so the compiler builds a state machine for you to remember where you currently are and what the local variables etc look like. This is much easier than writing an iterator yourself.