Speed-up for loops

[Nobody]

On Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:02:40 +0200, Michael Kreim wrote:

> I was comparing the speed of a simple loop program between Matlab and 
> Python.

> imax = 1000000000
> a = 0
> for i in xrange(imax):
>      a = a + 10
> print a

> Are there any ways to speed up the for/xrange loop?

Sure; the above can be reduced to just:

	print imax * 10
;)

More seriously, if you're comparing against Matlab, you should look at
NumPy. If there's a reasonably direct approach using NumPy, it will be
much quicker than a Python "for" loop (in a sense, NumPy is a library of
useful "for" loops implemented in C).

Even a fairly indirect NumPy approach is often quicker than pure Python.