On Sat, 02 Oct 2010 13:17:02 -0700, Carey Tilden wrote: > Have you profiled an application and found string concatenation to be > a performance bottleneck? I would be surprised, but it's always > possible. If not, I'd suggest you choose the technique that is most > clear and concise, and worry about performance only if it becomes a > real issue.
While I agree with your general point about premature optimization, I would not be the tiniest bit surprised to discover that string concatenation was a performance bottleneck -- and that it only shows up under some platforms and not others! Repeated string concatenation risks being an O(n**2) algorithm, which performs terribly. Last year there was a bug report of awful performance in the httplib module that only effected Windows users: http://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev%40python.org/msg40692.html httplib was FOUR HUNDRED times slower than IE at copying a file over a local network. Eventually the fault was tracked down to repeated string concatenation in the module: http://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev%40python.org/msg41150.html It costs nothing to avoid repeated string concatenation even prior to demonstrating a problem. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
