Code that ought to run fast, but can't due to Python limitations.

[Paul Rubin]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> writes:
> Yes, I'm aware of that, but that's not what John's code is doing -- he's 
> doing a series of if expr ... elif expr tests. I don't think a case 
> statement can do much to optimize that.

The series of tests is written that way because there is no case
statement available.  It is essentially switching on a bunch of
character constants and then doing some additional tests in each
branch.

It could be that using ord(c) as an index into a list of functions
might be faster than a dict lookup on c to get a function.  I think
John is hoping to avoid a function call and instead get an indexed
jump within the Python bytecode for the big function.