python speed

[Steven Bethard]

David Rasmussen wrote:
> Harald Armin Massa wrote:
> 
>> Dr. Armin Rigo has some mathematical proof, that High Level Languages
>> like esp. Python are able to be faster than low level code like
>> Fortran, C or assembly.
> 
> Faster than assembly? LOL... :)

I think the claim goes something along the lines of "assembly is so hard 
to get right that if you can automatically generate it from a HLL, not 
only will it be more likely to be correct, it will be more likely to be 
fast because the code generator can provide the appropriate optimizations".

OTOH, you can almost certainly take automatically generated assembly 
code and make optimizations the code generator wasn't able to, thanks to 
knowing more about the real semantics of the program.

STeVe