When Python outruns C++ ...

[Andrew Dalke]

Greg Ewing:
> This kind of thing has been observed before -- I believe
> someone noticed that using get() on a dict was slower than
> indexing and catching the exception.

Barry Warsaw, IPC...6?  The one in San Jose, I think.

Yep, here it is.
  http://barry.warsaw.us/papers/ecshort.pdf

It shows that try/except is faster than setdefault when
the number of exceptions is low.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com