[Tutor] list comprehension, efficiency?

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010, Lie Ryan wrote:
>On 09/28/10 13:57, Bill Allen wrote:
>> I can now see that quite a bit of the code I write dealing with lists
>> can be done with list
>> comprehensions.   My question is this, is the list comprehension styled
>> code generally
>> more efficient at runtime?  If so, why?
>
>Yes, because the looping in list comprehension is done in C instead of a
>python construct. However, they are the type of efficiency that you
>shouldn't bother yourself with unless you're microoptimizing.

True enough, but dealing with large lists can be expensive,
particularly when appending.  Before I discovered sets, I found
significant time savings by creating a dictionary, adding as
necessary, then use d.keys() to get the keys back.

This became a significant factor when I was selecting unique
lines from about 1.3 million samples.

Bill
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