Fatest standard way to sum bytes (and their squares)?

[Duncan Booth]

Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote:

> So far the fastest way I've found is using the `sum` builtin and 
> generators::
> 
>      ordinalSum = sum(ord(x) for x in data)
>      ordinalSumSquared = sum(ord(x)**2 for x in data)
> 
> This is about twice as fast as an explicit loop, but since it's going to 
> be processing massive amounts of data, the faster the better.  Are there 
> any tricks I'm not thinking of, or perhaps helper functions in other 
> modules that I'm not thinking of?
> 

I haven't timed it, but at the very least I'd avoid going through all the 
data twice:

count = {}
for i in range(256):
  count[chr(i)] = 0
for x in data:
  count[x] += 1

ordinalSum = sum(ord(c)*count[c] for c in count)
ordinalSumSquared = sum(ord(c)**2 * count[c] for c in count)