On Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:15:06 -0700, TerryP wrote: > On Oct 11, 3:42 pm, Esmail <ebo...@hotmail.com> wrote: >> cool .. I hadn't seen that. Not working quite at the 'pythonic' level >> yet I am not sure I think it's more readable that the if statement. >> Also, curious if the dictionary approach is more efficient. >> >> > Somehow I doubt that "Look up X in dictionary D" could ever be more > efficient (in terms of space and time, at least) then "Check if X is > equal to Y". It's not about what you get in runtime but what you get in > monkey time.
A single equality check, obviously not. Now suppose you have 100 conditions to test. Which is faster, one dict lookup, or up to 100 separate if X == Y tests? (On average, you need to test half the conditions before finding the match.) Hint: dicts are used internally by Python for storing names. > I might take flak here, for writing something like 'dict[key] > (func_args)' instead of something more Pythonic, Looking up a first-class function in a dictionary and passing arguments to it is perfectly Pythonic. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
