writing code over several lines

[Alex Martelli]

Peter Hansen wrote:
   ...
> They still have only four bytes (a pointer) per element, and surely for
> any tuple or list where one could possibly be concerned about memory
> consumption the number of elements far outweighs the overhead associated
> with the structure itself (which is probably on the order of a few bytes
> anyway).

One counterexample from the dark ages:

map(twoargsfunc, lotsoffirstargs, (onesecondarg,)*len(lotsoffirstargs))

the memory consumption of all the constructed tuple's elements is
fixed -- sizeof(onesecondarg) if Python has sizeof (don't you wish...;-),
as all slots in the tuple point to that one object.

So, here, the overhead of the structure itself might be important,
since the elements in that structure aren't; so a tuple MAY be a good
thing.

Today we do [twoargsfunc(x,onesecondarg) for x in lotsoffirstargs]
and we don't worry much about huge tuples made all of the same
element any more;-).  But there may still be a few such cases around.


Alex