Paul Rubin wrote: > Steven D'Aprano writes: >> Yes, I'm aware of that, but that's not what John's code is doing -- he's >> doing a series of if expr ... elif expr tests. I don't think a case >> statement can do much to optimize that. > > The series of tests is written that way because there is no case > statement available. It is essentially switching on a bunch of > character constants and then doing some additional tests in each > branch.
Although doing some of the tests first and then checking the input conditionally might be faster here. Another idea: You could exchange the methods whenever self.contentModelFlag changes, i.e. you'd have a "dataState_CDATA", a "dataState_PCDATA" etc. > It could be that using ord(c) as an index into a list of functions > might be faster than a dict lookup on c to get a function. Rather unlikely, given that calling "ord(c)" involves a dict lookup for "ord". You might get away with the pre-initialised keywords trick, though. > I think > John is hoping to avoid a function call and instead get an indexed > jump within the Python bytecode for the big function. Hmm, yes, the actual code inside the conditionals is pretty short, so the call overhead might hurt here. Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
