[Tutor] list comprehension, efficiency?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 3 Oct 2010 01:17:39 am bob gailer wrote:

> I ran dis on a for loop and the equivalent comprehension.
>
> I was surprised to see almost identical code.
>
> I had assumed (and now wish for) that a comprehension would be a
> primitive written in C and thus much faster!

How could it be? A list comp is syntactic sugar. It needs to perform the 
same steps as a for-loop, and call an arbitrary Python expression. It's 
not like map() that takes a function object. Unless you had a separate 
primitive for every imaginable Python expression -- which is 
impossible -- list comps need to generate relatively similar code to 
for-loops because they do relatively similar things.

Besides, in recent versions of Python the speed of for-loops is quite 
good. The bottleneck is rarely the loop itself, but the work you do in 
the loop or the size of the loop.


-- 
Steven D'Aprano