Python's simplicity philosophy

[Terry Reedy]

"Paul Rubin" <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote in message
news:7xr803ipj4.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com...
> Sorry, yeah, Lisp jargon.  A cons cell is a pair but "consing" has a
> more generalized informal meaning of allocating any kind of storage
on
> the heap, which will have probably to be garbage collected later.
> Consing up an object means building it up dynamically.

This 'generalized informal' meaning is new to me also ;-).

> The way I usually uniq a list goes something like (untested):
>
>   def uniq(list):
>     p = 0
>     for i in xrange(1, len(list)):
>        if list[i] != list[p]:
>           p += 1
>           list[p] = list[i]
>     del list[p+1:]
>
> So it just scans through the list once and then does a single del
> operation.

I believe this requires list to be sorted,  generally O(nlogn) if not
already so, while hash solution (sets, dict) is O(n) (+O(n) temporary
space).  So either method can be 'best' in particular situation.

Terry J. Reedy