Rafael Almeida wrote: > On Sat, 07 Apr 2007 04:35:49 +0200 > Gabriel Genellina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Speed? Eficiency? File size? Ease of use? >> A .pyc *could* be written in ASCII, but what do you gain? Replacing a >> few trivial functions in the Python core with a printf/scanf equivalent? >> At the same time you lose a lot of speed, so I don't see the point. > > Hm, I didn't realise that it would be that much slower.
You may mistakenly believe that casts are an expensive operation, when in fact they take no time at all - they merely instruct the compiler to treat specific pieces of data in specific ways. > >> Why harder? Once you read the file, they're just numbers. Anyway, being >> harder to program the *interpreter* is not a problem, if you gain >> something like speed or eficiency for the interpreted language. > > Well, it's harder to get 4 bytes and create an int out of it in a > portable way than just call strtol or scanf, that's what I thought > while I was coding my interpreter. It's not the hardest thing to do, > of course, but it made me wonder why not just do the simplest thing. > Because they aer smarter than you, without wishing to be too rude. > Since I've never seen a .pyc bigger than a few kilobytes, I thought an > ascii file would take more space, but it wouldn't be anything really > prohibitive. > > I didn't think using strtol would make that much difference in speed. > But now you talked about it, and after thinking a little bit more about > it, I'm convinced that the speed difference may be relevant. > Which is a good reason to think about things *before* you post. >>> And when I tried to code an assembler my problems got greater, as I >>> wanted to code it in python (the interpreter was in C++) and I had a >>> hard time trying to figure out how I would print something that's not a >>> ascii or unicode string. As for the benefits, I couldn't figure out any. >> Sorry, I could not understand what you said here. > > It's not anything important, I was just saying that I had to write a > little more code to make an integer such as 0xff into '\0\0\0\377' than > it would need to just print the integer. Well, unless there's already a > python function that does just that and I didn't know about. It's was > just an example on how writting in ascii is easier. Speed, baby, speed. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com Skype: holdenweb http://del.icio.us/steve.holden Recent Ramblings http://holdenweb.blogspot.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
