Tim Peters on speed!

[Don Tuttle]

Ok, now that I have your attention <wink>...

In studing Tim' recipe "Remove duplicates from a sequence"
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/52560

Tim assigns the result back to the original list rather than a new list.
Was this done for performance or convenients?  Is there a performance
penalty for using a second list?

    try:
          t = list(s)
          t.sort()
    except TypeError:
          del t  # move on to the next method
    else:
          assert n > 0
          last = t[0]
          lasti = i = 1
          while i < n:
              if t[i] != last:
                  t[lasti] = last = t[i]
                  lasti += 1
              i += 1
          return t[:lasti]

Don