My question is, at what point does it become incumbent on the language to provide a more meaningful idiom for this kind of expression? I think the point at which constructs like this leak into your official documentation is a pretty good line to start thinking about it. :)
Brilliant or insane code?
111–114 of 114 posts
Re: Brilliant or insane code?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, I would be very surprised if the zip version was faster. One of the first steps to optimization in python is moving everything you can to generators and using of itertools. The OP's question of is this genius or bad is clear in that regard: it is bad, due to not being the proper optimization direction, but it is interesting.
That is a common misconception. Moving to iterators adds a function call while list creation in C is quite fast. Every case has to be tested for performance.
In my experience, building a non-trivially transformed sequence with the builtin C-backed list and list comprehensions vs iterators and generators, the iterators and generators win.
Maybe I'm doing crazy stuff, though!
Re: Brilliant or insane code?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a common misconception. Moving to iterators adds a function call while list creation in C is quite fast. Every case has to be tested for performance.
I always thought the reason iterators are used in preference to lists was due to the memory advantages, not the performance.
The memory advantages are key to performance when you have a non-trivially sized dataset, in my experience.
Re: Brilliant or insane code?
#114Maybe I'm misreading it, but to me the far more heinous crime than using difficult code (setting aside that it's in the docs) is that the docstring is a total lie.
"""Parses an array of xyz points and returns a array of point dictionaries."""
'Only, it doesn’t really. It takes an iterable of points...and returns an iterable of 3-tuples of groupped points'
"""Parses an iterable of values [x,y,z,x,y,z...] and returns an iterable of 3-tuples: [(x,y,z),(x,y,z)...]"""