"Diez B. Roggisch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > That particular implementation used 3 or 4 tag-bits. Of course you are > right that nowadays python won't notice the difference, as larger nums > get implicitely converted to a suitable representation. But then the > efficiency goes away... Basically I think that trying to come up with > all sorts of optimizations for rather marginal problems (number > crunching should be - if a python domain at all - done using Numarray)
I don't think it's necessarily marginal. Tagged ints can be kept in registers, which means that even the simplest code that does stuff with small integers becomes a lot more streamlined, easing the load on both the Python GC and the cpu's memory cache. Right now with the bytecode interpreter, it probably doesn't matter, but with Pypy generating native machine code, this kind of thing can make a real difference. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
