Michael Foord, 26.01.2010 01:14: > How great is the complication? Making list.pop(0) efficient sounds like > a worthy goal, particularly given that the reason you don't use it is > because you *know* it is inefficient
I agree. Given a programmer the insight that lists are implemented as arrays in CPython is essentially saying "don't use list.pop(0), it's SLOW!". So they won't use it, and even avoid it for small lists where it doesn't really matter. It basically stinks. Making list.pop(0) fast removes another edge where programmers must prematurely concentrate on implementation specifics of the interpreter they use, rather than the functionality they want to implement. I think that's an improvement to the simplicity that Python provides. It's basically saying: "care about performance when you have to, but otherwise believe in the core developers to make your code fast enough in most common cases". Stefan _______________________________________________ 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
