In article <3ac173bd-4124-434d-b726-0b9baaeec...@36g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>, Steve Howell <showel...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> In my case I'm not really concerned about giving the memory back right > away, it's more about keeping my code simple. Once I'm done with an > element, I do just want to pop it off and keep all the simplicity of > the lists, but I am just concerned enough speed that for a 1000 > element list, I don't want to be doing 1000 memmoves for an average of > 500 pointers, which effectively moves about a million bytes around for > no reason. If you really want to pop all the elements from a long list, reverse the list and pop them off the end. Popping every element off the beginning of the list is O(n^2), as you pointed out. Reversing the list is O(n), and each pop after that is O(1), so the overall complexity is O(n). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
