stylistic question -- optional return value

[Roy Smith]

 Frank Buss <fb at frank-buss.de> wrote:
> My experience with other languages: Don't do performance tuning until you 
> have profiled your program and found the hot spots, because often I was 
> suprised, where the hot spots were.

This is good advice with any language, but I think it's especially good 
advice in a very high level language like Python (and TCL, and I 
suspect, C++/STL), where there's so much going on that isn't in lines of 
code you wrote.

It's also virtually always true that the real way to speed up a program 
is not code tweaking, but using better algorithms.