good way to do side effects on lists?

[Eli Stevens (WG.c)]

Istvan Albert wrote:
> now let's turn on psyco:
> 
> import psyco
> psyco.full()
...
> oh boy.

Judging from this post:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&selm=2259b0e2.0308240638.38350cba%40posting.google.com

It seems like Psyco can detect simple "hey, let's see how fast this can 
go with Psyco" tests, and can give skewed results.  I wouldn't expect a 
50x improvement in the general case (though if you have to do simplistic 
things over and over, Psyco is the way to go ;).

I'm not trying to bash Psyco - two lines netting a 2x speed boost is 
great, but it's good to avoid setting expectations too high.  :)  I 
started experimenting with Psyco a few weeks ago, and found I was 
getting about 2x for my application.  ISTR the docs saying that more 
numerical stuff worked well with Psyco; the OP hinted that there was 
number crunching involved.  Certainly worth a look.

Eli