On 5/11/07, Raymond Hettinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Newly developed code always faces an uphill battle when compared to > mature open-source.
As it should. :-) > End-users (everyday Python programmers) need to be understand the > performance intuitively and have a clear understanding of what is going > on under-the-hood. Our existing data structures have the virtue of having a > simple mental model (except for aspects of re-sizing and over-allocation which > are a bit obscure). I guess I have a different perspective. One advantage of the BList is that the user doesn't *need* to understand what's going on under-the-hood. They can rely on it to have good performance for any operation. One of my motivations in creating it was so I could be more lazy in the future. With a BList, I don't have to wonder whether Python code I write will ever be called with a really big list, and, if so, whether I need to rewrite my algorithm to avoid O(n^2) behavior. > That would likely be an informative exercise and would assure that your code > is truly interchangable with regular lists. It would also highlight the > under-the-hood difficulties you'll encounter with the C-API. > > That being said, it is a labor intensive exercise and the time might be better > spent on tweaking the third-party module code and building a happy user-base. I actually don't think it will be that bad, since list operations go through one thin API. I just need to redirect the API in listobject.h and I'm mostly done. I think. Maybe I'll take a quick pass at it, and if it turns into a nightmare, I'll reconsider. > > Indeed, I wrote the BList because there were idioms that I > > wanted to use that were just not practical with an array-based list. > > We ought to set up a page on the wiki for success stories with blist as a > third-party module. In time, the Right Answer (tm) will become self-evident. I haven't used the python.org wiki before. If you point me to the right place put a link to a BList page, I'd be happy to create one. Somewhere under UsefulModules? -- Daniel Stutzbach, Ph.D. President, Stutzbach Enterprises LLC _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
