On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:09:59 am Greg Ewing wrote:
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
if you want to know how long it takes to make fresh stir-fried chicken, you have to include the ten minutes it takes to chop up the vegetables and chicken,
Don't forget to include the time required to catch and kill the chicken as well!
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan Of course all timing tests make certain assumptions, and the art of optimization is partly to recognise when those assumptions are violated. If you do have a situation where you are executing the exact same code repeatedly, then pre-compiling is a good optimization over calling exec on the string directly. But you can't exclude the time for pre-compiling in the general case. -- Steven D'Aprano