Two questions about Python..

Cameron Laird claird at starbase.neosoft.com
Wed Nov 28 09:35:20 EST 2001


In article <3C045ACA.C336DEFA at engcorp.com>,
Peter Hansen  <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
>Cameron Laird wrote:
>> 
>> Kragen Sitaker  <kragen at pobox.com> wrote:
>> >Ville Vainio <vvainio at karhu.tp.spt.fi> writes:
>> >
>> >> Ken <khirmint at hotmail.com> writes:
>> >> > I'm looking into using Python for a project, and was wondering how does
>> >> > Python rank up against other scripting languages for speed?
>> >
>> >It's about as fast as Perl, much faster than Tcl or sh, and much
>> >slower than Lua, a good Scheme, FORTH, or GhostScript, in my
>> >experience.  HTH.
>> 
>> And it depends, of course, on the kind of project of interest.
>> Numeric makes Python a world-beater for many problems, for
>> example.
>
>Cameron, can you confirm that by this you mean that for 
>intensively numeric-processing-bound programs, the Numeric 
>package effectively makes Python a *higher* performance 
>solution than most/all other solutions?  Or were you talking 
>more about features and ease-of-use, for example?
			.
			.
			.
Thank you, Peter, for this opportunity to clarify.
"Both" is my answer to your nicely-leading question,
although I had the former in mind when I first posted:
old-line "scientific" programs, which are bound by
speed of numeric processing, are certainly not "much
slower" in Numeric Python than even "a good Scheme" or
Lua, and are frequently faster.  I write this as a fan
of Scheme and Lua.  I also recognize that I don't have
as much recent experience with scientific programming
as some readers; I'm reasonably confident that I'm
working from trustworthy data, though.
-- 

Cameron Laird <Cameron at Lairds.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html



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