Favorite non-python language trick?

[Mandus]

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 08:35:58 +0200 skrev Peter Otten:
> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 21:30:26 +0200, Peter Otten wrote:
>> 
>>> Mandus wrote:
>>> 
>>>> By using the builtin reduce, I
>>>> move the for-loop into the c-code which performs better.
>>> 
>>> No. There is no hope of ever writing fast code when you do not actually
>>> measure its performance.
>> 
>> Good grief! You've been spying on Mandus! How else could you possibly know
>> that he doesn't measure performance? Are you running a key-logger on his
>> machine? *wink*
>
> His mentioning reduce() as a performance panacea was a strong indication
> even without looking over his shoulders. He filled in some conditions in a
> later post, but "[U]sing reduce ... performs better [than a for-loop]" is
> just wrong.

Ok - so sometimes reduce() for convenience (nha, that's just me...),
sometimes for performance. In some cases clever use of map/reduce/etc.
have given a good speedup - say  4 times that of for-loops. But going to
C can give 10 to 100 times speed up over that again... So it depends how
important the performance is. Going to C/Fortran is always a bit more
hassel, while reduce is something you can stick in your interactive
session to finish the work rather before than after lunch :)

[snip]
>
>> Isn't it reasonable to just say, "I use join because it is faster than
>> adding strings" without being abused for invalid optimization?
>
> OK, I am making a guess: "".join(strings) is more often faster than
> naive string addition than reduce() wins over a for-loop.

you're probably right.

> I don't think my pointed comment qualifies as "abuse", by the way.

neither think I.


-- 
Mandus - the only mandus around.