How naive is Python?
John Nagle
nagle at animats.com
Mon Jan 15 12:25:17 EST 2007
skip at pobox.com wrote:
> John> Sorry, Skip, but I find that very hard to believe. The foo()
> John> function would take quadratic time if it were merely adding on
> John> pieces of constant size -- however len(str(i)) is not a constant,
> John> it is O(log10(i)), so the time should be
> John> super-quadratic.
>
> Sorry, I should have pointed out that I'm using the latest version of
> Python. I believe += for strings has been optimized to simply extend s when
> there is only a single reference to it.
I'd heard that, but wasn't sure. That's the kind of answer I was
looking for.
That kind of optimization is a huge win.
John Nagle
More information about the Python-list
mailing list