Below is a "standard recursive answer", similar to the other similar answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/23743696/711085 . (We don't realistically have to worry about running out of stack space since there's no way we could process all N! permutations.)
It visits every element in turn, and either takes it or leaves it (we can directly see the 2^N cardinality from this algorithm).
def combs(xs, i=0):
if i==len(xs):
yield ()
return
for c in combs(xs,i+1):
yield c
yield c+(xs[i],)
Demo:
>>> list( combs(range(5)) )
[(), (0,), (1,), (1, 0), (2,), (2, 0), (2, 1), (2, 1, 0), (3,), (3, 0), (3, 1), (3, 1, 0), (3, 2), (3, 2, 0), (3, 2, 1), (3, 2, 1, 0), (4,), (4, 0), (4, 1), (4, 1, 0), (4, 2), (4, 2, 0), (4, 2, 1), (4, 2, 1, 0), (4, 3), (4, 3, 0), (4, 3, 1), (4, 3, 1, 0), (4, 3, 2), (4, 3, 2, 0), (4, 3, 2, 1), (4, 3, 2, 1, 0)]
>>> list(sorted( combs(range(5)), key=len))
[(),
(0,), (1,), (2,), (3,), (4,),
(1, 0), (2, 0), (2, 1), (3, 0), (3, 1), (3, 2), (4, 0), (4, 1), (4, 2), (4, 3),
(2, 1, 0), (3, 1, 0), (3, 2, 0), (3, 2, 1), (4, 1, 0), (4, 2, 0), (4, 2, 1), (4, 3, 0), (4, 3, 1), (4, 3, 2),
(3, 2, 1, 0), (4, 2, 1, 0), (4, 3, 1, 0), (4, 3, 2, 0), (4, 3, 2, 1),
(4, 3, 2, 1, 0)]
>>> len(set(combs(range(5))))
32
product
, etc.) – ninjagecko