Tim Peters added the comment:

[Senthil Kumaran]
> I am unaware of the optimization technique you refer to as
> well, it will helpful if you could point to any resource.

It's an old trick since the very first Pythons:  global lookups are
much slower than local lookups (the difference between the LOAD_GLOBAL
and LOAD_FAST opcodes in CPython).  Putting:

     ..., _fast=slow, ...

in an argument list means we endure the slow lookup (of `slow`) only
once, when the function is first defined.  When the function is
_called_, that binding is available via the local (much faster lookup)
variable `_fast`.

Purely a speed trick, but can make a real difference in very heavily
used functions.

And it's a Good Idea to put a leading underscore on such arguments.
It's never intended that users pass values for them.

----------
nosy: +tim.peters

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue14927>
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