I almost wrote a long reply to all this. In the end it boils down to being concerned about how much overhead there is to calling a 'C' function. I assumed that file.seek() simply delegated to fseek() and thus was one way to test this overhead. However, I now think that it must be doing more and may not be a reasonable comparison.
I have used the profiler about as much as I can to find where my program is slow, and it appears to me that the overhead to calling 'C' functions is now my biggest problem. I have been using Ctypes, which has been a great tool so far. I just discovered Cython and this looks like it may help me. I had not heard of pythoid, so I will check it out. I did not mean to offend anybody in Cython community. It just seemed funny to me that 21 lines of Python became 1478 lines of 'C'. I wasn't really expecting any response to this. I don't know enough about this to really assume anything. Stephan, I just tested 1e7 loops. 'C': 8.133 seconds Cython: 10.812 seconds I can't figure out what Cython is using for CFLAGS, so this could be important. I used While instead of xrange, because I thought it would be faster in Cython. They had roughly the same execution speed. Thanks all for the suggestions. I think I will just consider this thread closed. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
