Ben Wing schrieb:
> i do see your point. i was trying to remember what i ended up doing
> when i ran into this issue before, and in fact i ended up just making a
> new list and appending all the elements i didn't want to delete. i see
> you'd get N^2 behavior if you deleted lots of elements from a list, but
> you get the same thing currently if you call `del list[i]' a lot; it's
> not obvious that iter.delete() actually "papers over" the cost any more
> than `del list[i]' does.
No, it wouldn't. OTOH, copying into a new list and then performing
slice-assignment is O(N). So performance-wise, it is (surprisingly)
asymptotically better to create a new list.
> however, for hash tables there's no reason to use iter.delete(). you
> should just be able to write `del hash[x]'. is this disallowed
> currently?
Try for yourself:
py> x={1:2,3:4}
py> for k in x:
... if k < 2:
... del x[k]
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration
> if so, it seems like something that should be fixed.
It's difficult to fix: deleting an item may cause a resizing/rehashing
of the entire dictionary, hence the dictionary is looked while being
iterated over. I *think* that one could support deletion (but not
addition); this would need further investigation.
Regards,
Martin
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
Python-Dev@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
