I was going through Jon Skeet's Reimplemnting Linq to Objects series. In the implementation of where article, I found the following snippets, but I don't get what is the advantage that we are gettting by splitting the original method into two.

Original Method:

// Naive validation - broken! 
public static IEnumerable<TSource> Where<TSource>( 
    this IEnumerable<TSource> source, 
    Func<TSource, bool> predicate) 
{ 
    if (source == null) 
    { 
        throw new ArgumentNullException("source"); 
    } 
    if (predicate == null) 
    { 
        throw new ArgumentNullException("predicate"); 
    } 
    foreach (TSource item in source) 
    { 
        if (predicate(item)) 
        { 
            yield return item; 
        } 
    } 
}

Refactored Method:

public static IEnumerable<TSource> Where<TSource>( 
    this IEnumerable<TSource> source, 
    Func<TSource, bool> predicate) 
{ 
    if (source == null) 
    { 
        throw new ArgumentNullException("source"); 
    } 
    if (predicate == null) 
    { 
        throw new ArgumentNullException("predicate"); 
    } 
    return WhereImpl(source, predicate); 
} 

private static IEnumerable<TSource> WhereImpl<TSource>( 
    this IEnumerable<TSource> source, 
    Func<TSource, bool> predicate) 
{ 
    foreach (TSource item in source) 
    { 
        if (predicate(item)) 
        { 
            yield return item; 
        } 
    } 
} 

Jon says - Its for eager validation and then defferring for the rest of the part. But, I don't get it.

Could some one please explain it in a little more detail, whats the difference between these 2 functions and why will the validations be performed in one and not in the other eagerly?

Conclusion/Solution:

I got confused due to my lack of understanding on which functions are determined to be iterator-generators. I assumed that, it is based on signature of a method like IEnumerable<T>. But, based on the answers, now I get it, a method is an iterator-generator if it uses yield statements.