Simon Brunning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > > is there a faster way to build a circular iterator in python that by doing this: > > > > c=['r','g','b','c','m','y','k'] > > > > for i in range(30): > > print c[i%len(c)] > > I don''t know if it's faster, but: > > >>> import itertools > >>> c=['r','g','b','c','m','y','k'] > >>> for i in itertools.islice(itertools.cycle(c), 30): > ... print i
Whenever you're using itertools, the smart money's on "yes, it's faster";-). E.g., on a slow, old iBook...: kallisti:~ alex$ python -mtimeit -s'c="rgbcmyk"' 'for i in range(30): c[i%len(c)]' 10000 loops, best of 3: 47 usec per loop kallisti:~ alex$ python -mtimeit -s'c="rgbcmyk"; import itertools as it' 'for i in it.islice(it.cycle(c),30): i' 10000 loops, best of 3: 26.4 usec per loop Of course, if you do add back the print statements they'll take orders of magnitude more time than the cyclic access, so /F's point on premature optimization may well be appropriate. But, if you're doing something VERY speedy with each item you access, maybe roughly halving the overhead for the cyclic access itself MIGHT be measurable (maybe not; it IS but a few microseconds, after all). I like itertools' approach because it's higher-abstraction and more direct. Its blazing speed is just a trick to sell it to conservative curmudgeons who don't see abstraction as an intrinsic good -- some of those are swayed by microseconds;-) Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
