Michael M. wrote: > Ok, here is the code. It is a translation of the following code, found > on the internet. > > * The C is very fast, Python not. > * Target: Do optimization, that Python runs nearly like C.
There is an error in the translated code. It returns 1600 digits instead of 800 digits. > > counter=c > while 0<=counter+4000: > f.append(2000) # f.append( int(a/5) ) > counter=counter-1 > # b=b+1 This creates a list f with length 9601. It should have a length of 2801. I found an explanation of the original C program at http://rooster.stanford.edu/~ben/maths/pi/code.html Using the variable names from the above explanation and editing the code posted by bearophile to match the explanation, I have the following: from time import clock def compute_pi(): pi = [] a = 10000 i = k = b = d = c = 0 k = 2800 r = [2000] * 2801 while k: d = 0 i = k while True: d += r[i] * a b = 2 * i - 1 r[i] = d % b d //= b i -= 1 if i == 0: break d *= i k -= 14 pi.append("%04d" % int(c + d // a)) c = d % a return "".join(pi) start_time = clock() pi = compute_pi() print pi print "Total time elapsed:", round(clock() - start_time, 2), "s" print len(pi) You're original version takes 2.8 seconds on my computer. The above version takes .36 seconds. I tried a couple of optimizations but couldn't make any more improvements. casevh -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list