Why is Python so slow ?- revisited.

[Michael Hudson]

bparsia at email.unc.edu (Bijan Parsia) writes:

> Michael Hudson <mwh21 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
[snip]
> > Does Python 1.2 have the local variable optimisation? 
> 
> What do you mean?
> 
> [snip]

Certainly at some point there was no LOAD_FAST opcode; every name
lookup would first look into a local dict, then the global one, then
the builtins.  Now references to locals are just indexes into (C)
vectors; this is much quicker.

I don't know when this happened; it was quite a whiles back (before my
time by a long way), but so was Python 1.2!

Cheers,
M.

-- 
  languages shape the way we think, or don't.
                                        -- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp