Drain or discard a generator without looping?

Question

In an exception handler for a CSP style process, I need to read and discard the entire contents of a channel in order to allow other processes that are blocking to send to i

Answer 1

You might try:

reduce(lambda _, __: None, chan)

But honestly I don't think you're going to do much better than the plain loop. "channel" suggests I/O which is going to be the bottleneck anyway.