Alan McIntyre wrote: > I wasn't interested in the time to execute the entire 200k append > operations; as Mr. Martelli pointed out earlier, it's O(n^2), but the += > append (considered by itself) appears to be O(n). Right: each append is O(N), so (since building up a long string of small pieces requires O(N) appends) the overall operation is O(N**2). Alex