Deleting the first element of a list
Peter Hansen
peter at engcorp.com
Wed Oct 2 19:25:59 EDT 2002
Erik Max Francis wrote:
> JB wrote:
>
>
>>Is using del to delete the first element (that is, the 0th
>>element) of a list faster than x = x[1:]?
>
> The short answer, though, is not to optimize prematurely. That's the
> First Rule of Optimization:
Actually, that's the first rule of *programming*. :-)
> Don't bother optimizing until you have
> quantitative information about where the bottlenecks truly are. This
> concept is especially powerful in a high-level language like Python; the
> very choice of using Python means that you're willing to trade raw speed
> for flexibility. If you're overconcerned with squeezing every last bit
> of CPU power right from the start, then Python (or any other high-level
> language) was probably not a good choice of languages.
Well stated, although a note about changing algorithms generally
providing the most significant speedups might be in order. Even
with Python, picking a better algorithm can produce huge gains.
(This does not, of course, apply to a small idiomatic choice such
as this thread was about.)
-Peter
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