Python example: possible speedup?

[Hrvoje Niksic]

"Tim Peters" <tim_one at email.msn.com> writes:

> Was the Perl code to which you're comparing it as general as your
> Python code?

The Perl code was almost equivalent to the first posted version of
Python code -- the only important difference is that it used a
functional approach rather than OOP.  I can mail it to you if you are
curious.

Generality is important to me because another day I might wish to do
something else with those files, like draw a tree of dependencies, or
something.  In that case, I'd surely want to reuse the existing
reader/parser.  Speed is good, but not so good to justify loss of code
reuse.

Robert's solution is ideologically similar to the `grep' solution
proposed below.