As long as you are optimizing, addition is slightly faster than multiplication:
$ python2.4 -mtimeit 'h=1;h*=2' 1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.286 usec per loop $ python2.4 -mtimeit 'h=1;h=h+h' 1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.23 usec per loop Of course, that's only a 20% decrease, so it might not be worth the trouble. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
