It means you can have generator functions that contain no yield statements, which is not as crazy as it sounds. I've had to do `if False: yield` before in Pytho

It means you can have generator functions that contain no yield statements, which is not as crazy as it sounds. I've had to do `if False: yield` before in Python to trick the language into treating a function as a generator. An unyielding generator behaves so differently from a similar-looking non-generator function that the extra syntax seems more than appropriate to me. The asterisk also makes it trivial (using regular expressions) to tell whether a string of code contains any generator functions. "Explicit is better than implicit" is a rule of thumb that Python supposedly values, but neglects to follow here!