On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 12:19, Vitor Bosshard <algorias@gmail.com> wrote:
I think you misunderstood my point. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough in my original message. I understand the performance characteristics of repeated concatenation vs str.join. I just wonder why the language goes out of its way to catch this particular occurrence of bad code, given there are plenty of ways to misuse sum or any other builtin for that matter. A newbie is more likely to get n**2 performance by using a for loop than sum:
final = "" for s in strings: final += s
Should python refuse to compile the above snippet? The answer is an emphatic "no".
All the individual operations there are fine. It's the composition that's wrong. Adding a sanity check would require recognizing that pattern, and changing the semantics of an individual operation based on what surrounds it. Not a nice thing to do. sum() is already a single operation (regardless of how it's implemented), so it doesn't have that problem. -- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus