*-unpacking

[David Mertz]

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote previously:
|Nope.  We're discussing situations where ONE pop from the start is
|needed; and you claimed I knew that in that case reversing the list
|and popping from the end was faster.

Nah. I believe the context of my first note in the thread made the
imagined situation obvious.  The situation Greg described was where you
want to look (from the left) at one item at a time, then decide
whether/when to grab the next based on that one.

That one-at-a-time-but-many-times seems to me the case where
'car,*cdr=thelist' is most useful.  And for that, one-reverse-
plus-many-pops is the best current approach.

I quite concur with Alex that a '.reverse()' is not particularly
worthwhile to do just one '.pop()' (I guess it turned out to save a
couple milliseconds, but nothing important).  The hermeneutics of the
thread aren't worth getting hung up on.

Of course, in Greg's case of parsing a dozen command-line switches, the
speed issue is not interesting.  The whole '.reverse()' thing only
matters when you need to handle thousands of items (and *that*, I think,
Alex will admit he knows :-)).

Yours, David...

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