On 9 Jan 2005 12:39:32 -0800, "John Machin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Tip 1: Once you have data in memory, don't move it, move a pointer or >index over the parts you are inspecting. > >Tip 2: Develop an abhorrence of deleting data. I've to admit that I also found strange that deleting the first element from a list is not O(1) in python. My wild guess was that the extra addition and normalization required to have insertion in amortized O(1) and deletion in O(1) at both ends of a random access sequence was going to have basically a negligible cost for normal access (given the overhead that is already present in python). But I'm sure this idea is too obvious for not having been proposed, and so there must reasons for refusing it (may be the cost to pay for random access once measured was found being far from negligible, or that the extra memory overhead per list - one int for remembering where the live data starts - was also going to be a problem). Andrea -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list