In the following code I create the graph with vertices sgb-words.txt (the file of 5 letter words from the stanford graphbase), and an edge if two words differ by one letter. The two methods I wrote seem to me to likely perform the same computations, the list comprehension is faster though (281 seconds VS 305 seconds on my dell mini).
Is the right interpretation of this timing difference that the comprehension is performed in the lower level C code? As this time I have no other conjecture about the cause. --------------------------------------------------------- import time import copy data = map (lambda x: x.strip(), open('sgb-words.txt').readlines()) def d (w1, w2): count = 0 for idx in range(0,5): if w1[idx] != w2[idx]: count += 1 return count print "creating graph" t0 = time.clock () graph = [[a,b] for a in data for b in data if d(a,b) ==1 and a < b] t1 = time.clock () print "took " + str (t1 - t0) + " seconds." t0 = time.clock () graph2 = [] for i in range (0, len(data)): for j in range(0,len(data)): if d(data[i],data[j]) == 1 and i < j: graph2.append ([i,j]) t1 = time.clock () print "took " + str (t1 - t0) + " seconds." -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list