Pop a list from beginning ? and memory saving...

[James T. Dennis]

Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:

> In article <aep4jb$1q8h$1 at news.idiom.com>,
> James T. Dennis <jadestar at idiom.com> wrote:

>> It might be better to have a hack to the implementation of the
>> list primitives --- so they defer the shift of remaining elements
>> until GC.  The head of the list could point at the first none 
>> deleted item.  Then pop(0) could be implemented in O(1) time and
>> the garbage collector would eventually come along to do it's 
>> job.

> While this might be a worthwhile optimization, it has absolutely nothing
> to do with GC.  Each time an element were popped off the front, its
> object would be decreffed and possibly deleted.  GC runs completely
> independently of individual objects.

 Sorry, I was speaking abstractly about garbage collection, I know
 nothing about Python's GC implementation.  Perhaps it would be an 
 opportunity to augment Python's GC.  Some containers (and even 
 some classes) could implement their own compaction routines that 
 could be called by the GC.