On Mar 28, 12:34 pm, Steve Howell <showel...@yahoo.com> wrote: > FYI I later obtained similar results with the more general: > accum += sublist
Yeah, but you still have to create an object of the correct type for accum. And for summing small lists, that will actually increase the runtime. (Worst case, a list of a single item: you have to create the accum object based on the type of the start value, then do two += into it, for the start value and the first item in the list, vs just doing a single + which automatically creates an object.) Personally, I think the most general approach, if sum were open to enhancements, would be to automatically apply Alf's suggestion of "+" on summing the first item to the start value, and "+=" on subsequent items. Also, you *could* add a parameter to sum(), for example, default "partialsums=False" that would allow the use of partial sums in those cases where that might give better behavior (such as floats and tuples). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
