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

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message <4a4f91f9$0$1587$742ec2ed at news.sonic.net>, John Nagle wrote:

> ("It should be written in C" is not an acceptable answer.)

I don't see why not. State machines that have to process input byte by byte 
are well known to be impossible to implement efficiently in high-level 
languages. That's why lex/flex isn't worth using. Even GCC has been moving 
to hand-coded parsers, first the lexical analyzer, and more recently even 
for the syntax parser (getting rid of yacc/bison), certainly for C.