fastest way to detect a user type

[Robin Becker]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Paul Rubin wrote:
> 
>> Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> writes:
>>> First question is, why do you care that it's slower? The difference
>>> between the fastest and slowest functions is 1.16-0.33 = 0.83
>>> microsecond.
>> That's a 71% speedup, pretty good if you ask me.
> 
> Don't you care that the code is demonstrably incorrect? The OP is
> investigating options to use in Python 3, but the fastest method will fail,
> because the "type is InstanceType" test will no longer work. (I believe the
> fastest method, as given, is incorrect even in Python 2.x, as it will
> accept ANY old-style class instead of just the relevant X or V classes.)

I'm not clear why this is true? Not all instances will have the __X__ 
attribute or has something else changed in Python3?

The original code was intended to be called with only a subset of all 
class instances being passed as argument; as currently written it was 
unsafe because an instance of an arbitrary old class would pass into 
branch 1. Of course it will still be unsafe as arbitrary instances end 
up in branch 3

The intent is to firm up the set of cases being accepted in the first 
branch. The problem is that when all instances are new style then 
there's no easy check for the other acceptable arguments eg float,int, 
str etc, as I see it, the instances must be of a known class or have a 
distinguishing attribute.

As for the timing, when I tried the effect of func1 on our unit tests I 
noticed that it slowed the whole test suite by 0.5%. Luckily func 3 
style improved things by about 0.3% so that's what I'm going for.
-- 
Robin Becker