[Python-Dev] 2.4 news reaches interesting places

[Paul Moore]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 01:05:09 -0200, Rodrigo Dias Arruda Senra
<rsenra at acm.org> wrote:
> But, but to the joke: I believe Python must strive to run at least as fast as the crowd --
> Java, Perl, Ruby, Lua, Boo, etc
> 
> Maybe we could visit the language shootout sites, translate Python snipets to modern
> 2.4 idioms and rerun the test suites:

Bill Janssen <janssen at parc.com> wrote:
> In the last couple of months, an acquaintance of mine has been trying
> out Python.  He likes the language, particularly the support for
> character sets, but has (apparently) given up after benchmarking a
> typical (for him) task against Perl.  The task is to use the "re"
> package to heavily modify a file by a sequence of re substitutions.

That might be a good idiom to review/translate/test. It's not a
particularly natural thing to do in Python (REs are used much less in
Python), but it's *very* natural in Perl, and a naive Perl->Python
translation will make Python look slower. So a case study showing how
you might "really" do a task like this in Python would be a useful
resource.

Also, it might point to somewhere where there are opportunities for
optimisation within Python (for some reason this reminds me of the
mutable byte buffer discussions from a while back).

Paul