On Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:09:26 +0000, Albert van der Horst wrote:
>>Existing Python implementations don't give you direct access to >>hardware, and bit-manipulation has a lot of overhead in Python. >>Numerical > > Surely you don't mean that > 0x17 & 0xAD > has more overhead than > 17 + 123 > So what do you mean here? What I mean is that bit-manipulation in low-level languages like C is very close to the metal, and hence very efficient. In Python, *all* operations (including bit-manipulation and arithmetic) has the overhead of the Python virtual machine. You won't notice the difference if you're just ANDing a handful of numbers, but if you're doing millions of them (say, you're doing industrial-strength encryption) you certainly will. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
