faster way for adding many strings

[Peter Hansen]

Ulli Stein wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> What is the faster way: appending many strings to a list and then joining 
> them, or writing to 
> StringIO and then getvalue()?

Alex' detailed response notwithstanding, there's another usual
answer to your question:

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming"
(D. Knuth)

It means you usually shouldn't care which is faster until (a) your
software is working fully, and (b) you have profiled the code
and determined that in fact you have an unacceptable bottleneck
which must be optimized to meet your requirements.

Don't get me wrong, there _are_ times to optimize.  You just
shouldn't see them very often... and life is simpler that way. :)

-Peter