Why ELIF?
Steven D'Aprano
steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au
Sun Oct 11 17:43:48 EDT 2009
On Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:15:06 -0700, TerryP wrote:
> On Oct 11, 3:42 pm, Esmail <ebo... at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> cool .. I hadn't seen that. Not working quite at the 'pythonic' level
>> yet I am not sure I think it's more readable that the if statement.
>> Also, curious if the dictionary approach is more efficient.
>>
>>
> Somehow I doubt that "Look up X in dictionary D" could ever be more
> efficient (in terms of space and time, at least) then "Check if X is
> equal to Y". It's not about what you get in runtime but what you get in
> monkey time.
A single equality check, obviously not.
Now suppose you have 100 conditions to test. Which is faster, one dict
lookup, or up to 100 separate if X == Y tests? (On average, you need to
test half the conditions before finding the match.)
Hint: dicts are used internally by Python for storing names.
> I might take flak here, for writing something like 'dict[key]
> (func_args)' instead of something more Pythonic,
Looking up a first-class function in a dictionary and passing arguments
to it is perfectly Pythonic.
--
Steven
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