[Tutor] Advise...

[Tony Meyer]

> Anyway, I know the first thing that some of you are going to 
> say is using eval().
[...] 
> Which, considering that it is supposed to be exactly 117, 
> It's darn good. 
> Unfortunately, it also takes about 10 seconds to do all that.
> Any suggestions? Any advice?

On my machine your version takes about 14 seconds.  If you replace
'eval(fofx)' with '3*x*x' it takes about 0.7 seconds.

Am I allowed to say "don't use eval()" if I'm saying it because it's
extremely slow, rather than for security reasons?  ;)

If the user must be able to enter in the function, then it would be better
to evaluate this once and turn it into some sort of function that you can
call inside the loop (it's the eval that is so expensive).  How to do that
depends a lot on how complex the possible functions can be (if they'll only
include 'x*+/-' and numbers, for example, it's not so tricky).

=Tony.Meyer