[Python-3000] range() issues

[Nick Coghlan]

Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>> In the slow example given, only one of the returned items needs to be a
>> long
> 
> This is Py3k. They are all longs.

Not inside the object they aren't - I believe the optimised one uses C 
longs internally, and converts to a Python long when it returns the 
values, whereas 'longrange' uses Python long objects internally as well. 
Oddly enough, this is going to make the increment/decrement operations 
for the counter quite a bit slower :)

One way to optimise this (since all we need to support here is counting 
rather than arbitrary arithmetic) would be for the longrange iterator to 
use some simple pure C fixed point arithmetic internally to keep track 
of an arbitrarily long counter, and only convert to a Python long when 
it has to (just like the optimised shortrange iterator).

I'm not sure it is worth the hassle though.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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