Sounds like it would be easier to just use C anyway.
There are plenty of AOT compiled languages, C isn't the only option, thankfully.
How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
21–30 of 224 posts
Re: How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
#22Sounds like it would be easier to just use C anyway.
Yes, but C is a much more arcane and complicated language. Case in point: instead of writing a+b in Python, in C you would have to write a+b (Jokes aside, it would really be more complicated in C if a and b were actually strings or lists.)
Or numbers that add up to over the size limit of what ever byte/int/long type you are using.
There's a surprising amount of depth to adding two numbers.
Re: How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
#23Sounds like it would be easier to just use C anyway.
Yes, but C is a much more arcane and complicated language. Case in point: instead of writing a+b in Python, in C you would have to write a+b (Jokes aside, it would really be more complicated in C if a and b were actually strings or lists.)
If a and b are strings, Python would make "ab".
Re: How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
#24Re: How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
#25There was some high-level discussion of this in the chat Guido van Rossum had with Lex Fridman (timestamped): https://youtu.be/-DVyjdw4t9I?t=3964
Re: How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
#26Sounds like it would be easier to just use C anyway.
Yes, but C is a much more arcane and complicated language. Case in point: instead of writing a+b in Python, in C you would have to write a+b (Jokes aside, it would really be more complicated in C if a and b were actually strings or lists.)
> it would really be more complicated in C if a and b were actually strings or lists
You don't event need strings or lists for that. Just imagine bigger numbers for a and b. Arbitrarily long integer addition is not a native language feature in C.
edit: formatting
Re: How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
#27What's the answer?
Article does not answer the question on its title.
Re: How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
#28Lines of C aren't the defining factor. You want total instructions executed.
IME I'd say a line of typical C code (not necessarily C++ code) maps to around 1..5 instructions on average. It's still a quite useful measure to get a rough idea how much CPU work happens.
Re: How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
#29Python's math operations are going to need a lot of C code because the numbers can be any size. It's part of what makes it so great for scientific computing (as you don't have to spend hours implementing arbitrary precision math - probably badly.) If that's too slow though there's always NumPy.
Re: How many lines of C it takes to execute a + b in Python
#30Python's math operations are going to need a lot of C code because the numbers can be any size. It's part of what makes it so great for scientific computing (as you don't have to spend hours implementing arbitrary precision math - probably badly.) If that's too slow though there's always NumPy.
That's only true for integers.
For scientific applications you'd typically want floating points and Python's floats are just regular ieee-754 doubles (or whatever "double" meant to the compiler used to compile that python interpreter).