On Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:13:07 +0200, Thorsten Kampe wrote: > One guy claims he has times between 2.7 and 5.7 seconds when > benchmarking more or less randomly generated "one million different > lines". That *is* *exactly* nothing.
We agree that in the grand scheme of things, a difference of 2.7 seconds versus 5.7 seconds is a trivial difference if your entire program takes (say) 8 minutes to run. You won't even notice it. But why assume that the program takes 8 minutes to run? Perhaps it takes 8 seconds to run, and 6 seconds of that is the decoding. Then halving that reduces the total runtime from 8 seconds to 5, which is a noticeable speed increase to the user, and significant if you then run that program tens of thousands of times. The Python dev team spend significant time and effort to get improvements of the order of 10%, and you're pooh-poohing an improvement of the order of 100%. By all means, reminding people that pre-mature optimization is a waste of time, but it's possible to take that attitude too far to Planet Bizarro. At the point that you start insisting, and emphasising, that a three second time difference is "*exactly*" zero, it seems to me that this is about you winning rather than you giving good advice. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
