> The test code below shows, that extracting bits from an integer value n > is faster when using n&0x01 than when using n%2 and I suppose it is > because %2 tries to handle the entire integer, where &0x01 processes > only the last two bytes of it (I come to this because the speed > difference between &0x01 and %2 operations depends on how large the > value n is)
I doubt that the reason is in & handling less data. The reason is that % is effectively a division, whereas & is a logical operation. Which have always been _way_ faster than divisions. Of course you are right that the bitfiddling _could_ be optimized when one knows that only certain bytes of a number would be of interest. But I seriously doubt that python does any optimization here. However, I don't know for sure. Regards, Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
