Fredrik Lundh wrote: > so what does the benchmark look like if you actually do this ? Okay, timing this: x = "" for i in range(100000): x += "a" t = x[1] # forces the concat object to render The result: Python 2.5 release: 30.0s Python 2.5 locally built: 30.2s Python 2.5 concat: 4.3s Improvement: 600% (1/7 of the time) /larry/