Patches item #1181334, was opened at 2005-04-12 09:00 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by arigo You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=305470&aid=1181334&group_id=5470
Category: Core (C code) Group: None Status: Open Resolution: None Priority: 5 Submitted By: Armin Rigo (arigo) >Assigned to: Guido van Rossum (gvanrossum) Summary: range() in for loops, again Initial Comment: Here is (yet) a(nother) patch to make range() lazy and fast in the context of for loops. This implementation allows any built-in function or method to declare two C implementations if it wants to. The second implementation, if present, is used when the caller can know for sure that it will only ever need an iterator over the result. This is done with a new ml_flag_iter member of PyMethodDef. To minimize compatibility issues a new METH_ITERABLE flag must be set when ml_flag_iter is valid. The CALL_FUNCTION bytecode uses that if the immediately following bytecode is GET_ITER. The patch updates range() to use this flag and build an xrange iterator object. Of course the same technique could be applied to other built-in functions, but none spring to mind. Maybe a simple patch that only special-cases range() would do just as well... FWIW, I get a 5% speed-up on pystone with this patch. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Comment By: Armin Rigo (arigo) Date: 2005-04-15 08:05 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=4771 All these examples would imply a slight semantic change, I think: for x in filter(f, y): if y is an iterator, the above line exhausts y before entering the loop. The same for map and zip. I want to avoid this at all costs, otherwise we'll see strange bug reports whose "solution" is: "well, just write instead seq=filter(f,y); for x in seq: "... which would be very bad, in my opinion. I'm already slightly concerned that r=range(10**7); for x in r: break behaves quite differently than for x in range(10**7): break with my patch. I believe that in this case it is an acceptable tread-off, but I would certainly not check this patch in without explicit BDFL approval. Guido, assigning to you for said principle approval or rejection... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Raymond Hettinger (rhettinger) Date: 2005-04-15 05:11 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=80475 There are several builtins that could offer an iterator alternative: range defers to xrange filter to itertools.ifilter map to itertools.imap (1) zip to itertools.izip All of these offer huge space savings and a little speed (with izip providing the best improvement because it avoids tons of tuple allocations). (1) an alternate imap needs to be provided since the itertools version does not provide the None fill-in feature. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Brett Cannon (bcannon) Date: 2005-04-13 19:56 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=357491 No, I don't remember you ever mentioning that, but that is a good idea since that would allow easy faking of things. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Armin Rigo (arigo) Date: 2005-04-13 10:24 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=4771 Ok, here is a patch special-casing range() only. It's a bit simpler, and faster too. Did I already mention around here that the class/type unification of Python 2.2 might have been better done, in my opinion, simply by replacing the built-in type() with lambda x: x.__class__? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Brett Cannon (bcannon) Date: 2005-04-13 00:31 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=357491 I vote for a patch to special-case range(). This won't be an issue in Python 3000 when stuff like this become generators. Still wish there was a way to come up with a range object that has ``type(range(1)) == list`` be true, but check the refcount on the object so that if it is 1 it can act as a generator instead. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Armin Rigo (arigo) Date: 2005-04-12 11:34 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=4771 Doesn't work, because the dict can be modified during iteration. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Neal Norwitz (nnorwitz) Date: 2005-04-12 11:03 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=33168 dict.keys(), dict.values(), and dict.items() could also be possibilities. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=305470&aid=1181334&group_id=5470 _______________________________________________ Patches mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/patches
