Yep, the fundamental termination mechanism seems to be the same. Years and years ago I got into some silly irc nerdgument with a python expert (I think one of the twisted people) about the ugliness of this design and for a moment I thought I got to triumphantly yell 'Told you so!' a decade later. Alas, not the case.
I take it you prefer the explicit test for the end of iteration?
As an historic note, the StopIteration form grew out of the earlier iterator form, which called __getitem__ with successive integers until there was an IndexError. That may explain a bias towards an exception-based approach.
I probably do, although in practice, given how well (and composable) python comprehensions/iterators/generators have turned out, getting all worked up about some implementation detail now seems a bit churlish and pointless.
