Implementing file reading in C/Python

[mk]

Johannes Bauer wrote:

> Which takes about 40 seconds. I want the niceness of Python but a little
> more speed than I'm getting (I'd settle for factor 2 or 3 slower, but
> factor 30 is just too much).

This probably doesn't contribute much, but have you tried using Python 
profiler? You might have *something* wrong that eats up a lot of time in 
the code.

The factor of 30 indeed does not seem right -- I have done somewhat 
similar stuff (calculating Levenshtein distance [edit distance] on words 
read from very large files), coded the same algorithm in pure Python and 
C++ (using linked lists in C++) and Python version was 2.5 times slower.

Regards,
mk