John Machin wrote: > Don't you mean y = x[1] or something like that? y = "".join(x) looks > like a copy-paste error.
You're right, by gum. Worse than that, my benchmark wasn't actually *doing* much of anything there; at the end of the run x was still length 0. That was sloppy, and I apologize. I cannot find a speedy equivalent to the 'xappend = x.append' trick for string concatenation using +. 'operator.__iadd__' is slower, a labored attempt using 'x = x("a").__add__' is better but still slower. So far, just calling 'x += "a"' is the fastest way, and that's 4.4s, still beat by the 'xappend = x.append' trick at 3.2s. > Playing the devil's advocate here: 10M adds each of a single byte > followed by 1 render doesn't seem very typical. How about [...] > Some of us have Windows boxes and don't have the necessary MS compiler. > Is there any chance of someone making a 2.5+patch Windows binary? I actually developed it on Windows. Here you go: http://larryhastings.com/programming/lch.python.2.5.concat.zip That contains the new python25.dll and my hacked-up benchmark script. Just back up your existing python25.dll, then unzip to your Python directory, and you're ready to rock. Enjoy, /larry/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list