On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 10:00 AM, Skip Montanaro skip.montanaro@gmail.com wrote:
As I indicated in an earlier response, there is some performance value to replacing the range function call with this (or other) syntactic sugar.
It's my impression that adding stuff like this primarily for performance is nothing on the list ;-)
But you could get the same effect by making range a keyword -- how often does anyone re-define it?
And if you allow variables:
range(i,j,k) or (i:j:k)
Then any optimizer needs to to run-time type checking, or type inference, or what have you anyway, so checking if the name range is the range object seems like a small issue.
FWIW, Cython does turn range calls into simple C loops:
for i in range(10):
becomes:
for (__pyx_t_1 = 0; __pyx_t_1 < 10; __pyx_t_1+=1) {
... }
In that case, the cython "language" doesn't allow re-defining of "range"
And it will do this if either literals or variables that have been type-def'd as integer types are passed in as arguments.
What difference this really makes to performance I have no idea -- you'd have to have something pretty trivial in that loop to notice it.
-Chris
While exceedingly rare, there is nothing to prevent a programmer from redefining the range builtin function or inserting a different version of range() in the local or global scopes:
def my_range(*args): # completely ignore args, returning something weird... return [1, "a", None, 2] import __builtin__ __builtin__.range = my_rangeIf you have a for loop which uses range():
for i in range(27): do something interesting with ioptimizers like PyPy which aim to be precisely compatible with CPython semantics must look up "range" every time it occurs and decide if it's the real builtin range function, in which case it can emit/execute machine code which is something like the C for loop:
for (i=start; i<stop; i+=step) { do something interesting with i }or not, in which case it has to call whatever range is, then respond with its list of (arbtrary) Python objects.
Syntactic sugar would lock down the standard behavior.
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