David: > What do you mean by best possible? Most efficient? Most readable?
What's a good wine? It's not easy to define what's "good/best". In such context it's a complex balance of correct, short, fast and readable (and more, because you need to define a context. This context refers to Psyco too). > And why don't you use islice? You are right, but the purpose of light slices that I have suggested is to avoid using islice so often. And currently Psyco doesn't digest itertools well. > D compiles to efficient machine code so Python is at a disadvantage > even if you use the same syntax (see my first example). You can make > the Python version faster, but beware of premature optimization. This time I don't agree with this "premature optimization" thing. My original Python version is just 5 lines long, it's readable enough, and it's a part of a large library of mine of similar functions, they must be fast because I use them all the time as building blocks in programs. > What I'dlike to see is a rope[1] module for Python. People have already suggested it, and there's even an implementation to replace Python strings. It was refused because... I don't know why, maybe its implementation was too much more complex than the current one, and it wasn't faster in all situations (and I think Guido wants data structures that try to replace the basic built-in ones to be faster in all situations and user-transparent too). Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
