where python is slower?

[Andrew Dalke]

Anders J. Munch:
> The grep/sort solution does a complete sort.  A C++ program that uses
> a smarter, better complexity algorithm like the Python versions do
> could be a lot faster.

Ahh, true.

>  Or is it i/o-bound?  I kinda presumed it wasn't but I'm having second
thoughts.

I double checked.  The original poster in that thread said:
] The wc program can read the same 300k lines in around 0.4 seconds

So it is not I/O bound.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com