[Tutor] Speed of accessing list components

[Danny Yoo]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Glen Wheeler wrote:

> >>> for i in range(1, len(l)+1):
> ..  print l[-i]


[output cut]

> is this exceptionally slow?  Or the preferred method?


Hi Glen,

It shouldn't be too slow.

But doing a reverse iteration on a list is, admittedly a little awkward in
Python right now.  There's a PEP by Raymond Hettinger that makes reverse
iteration more pleasant:

    http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0322.html

That PEP proposes to introduce a "reversed()" builtin that will go through
the list sequence in backwards order.  But that's Python 2.4 stuff, which
won't come out officially for a while yet.

In the meantime, though, we can write our own version of reversed():

###
def reversed(L):
    """Returns an iterator that marches through the elements of L
    in reverse order."""
    n = len(L) - 1
    while n >= 0:
        yield L[n]
        n -= 1
###


Here's reversed() in action:

###
>>> for x in reversed(range(10)):
...     print x,
...
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
###

Something like reversed() should make the code clearer, as you now don't
have to worry so much about maintaining those list indices by hand.

Hope this helps!