On Jan 23, 8:00 pm, Raymond Hettinger <pyt...@rcn.com> wrote: > [Steve Howell] > > > Why wouldn't you get a competent C programmer simply make > > list_ass_slice smart enough to make list.pop(0) O(1)? > > When this suggestion was discussed on python-dev years ago, > it was rejected. One reason is that it was somewhat > common for C code to access the list data structure directly > (bypassing API accessor functions). Changing the list to have > a starting offset would break existing C extensions. > > Another reason is that Guido is non-tolerant of space or time > trade-offs for lists and tuples because they pervade the language > and are heavily used internally. Any additional space or time > requirement however small would impact the language performance > as a whole. FWIW, that is also the reason that lists are not > weak-referenceable (it would cost one extra pointer field per > instance and that wasn't deemed to be worth it). > > > The brilliant computer scientist, Christian Heimes, provides the > > answers, and I am paraphrasing here, of course: > > IMHO, Christian IS a brilliant computer scientist, so I'll ignore > the rude intention and take the sentence literally. >
You are also a brilliant computer scientist, despite the fact that you are defending a list implemenation that can't pop the first element off the list in O(1) time. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
