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 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue14927> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com