Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:08:04 +1100, Jervis Whitley wrote: > > >>> This moves the for-loop out of slow Python into fast C and should be >>> much, much faster for very large input. >>> >>> >> _Should_ be faster. > > Yes, Python's timing results are often unintuitive.
Indeed. > It seems to me that I was mistaken -- for large enough input, the running > time of each version converges to approximately the same speed. No, you were right. Both any_test() and for_test() use the improvement you suggested, i. e. loop over the vowels, not the characters of the word. Here's the benchmark as it should have been: $ python -m timeit -s'word = "g"*10000' 'any(v in word for v in "aeiouAEIOU")' 1000 loops, best of 3: 314 usec per loop $ python -m timeit -s'word = "g"*10000' 'any(c in "aeiouAEIOU" for c in word)' 100 loops, best of 3: 3.48 msec per loop Of course this shows only the worst case behaviour. The results will vary depending on the actual word e. g. "Ug..." or "g...a". Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
