loop in python

[bruno modulix]

Terry Reedy wrote:
> "Benjamin Niemann" <pink at odahoda.de> wrote in message 
> news:dedgo7$mru$1 at online.de...
> 
(snip)
>>In that case, you are interested in IO performance. The time spent 
>>handling
>>the loop is not significant compared to the time spent executing the
>>'print' statement - which is a very complex operation despite its simple
>>usage.
>>
>>An implementation where a simple control flow structure has an measurable
>>impact on the overall timing of an IO bound program would really 
>>suprising.
>>Python suprises me often, but in different ways ;)
>>
>>Perhaps you could try to use sys.stdout.write() directly, avoiding the
>>overhead of 'print'. Perhaps there are differences between the (default)
>>output buffering settings of perl and python.
> 
> 
> According to postings some years ago, the perl folks have worked specially 
> hard to speed I/O, even to the point of replacing or rewriting some of the 
> C stdio library, at least for some systems.  Hence, at that time, Perl was 
> expected and known to be noticeably faster than Python on such systems. 

The truth is that the Perl version of the "print loop" program is
incredibly faster than it's C counterpart (at least on my gentoo/linux
box). Since the "no-op loop" program is faster in C (I guess that GCC
'optimizes out' the whole loop !-), it seems clear that Perl's IO do not
relie on the stdlib implementation.

> Since then, Python I/O has been sped up to at least make better use of 
> stdio, so the gap may be less.

The Python and C versions of the "print loop" program have execution
times that are close enough...

> 3. One should test computations that are relevant to the question being 
> asked.  

Of course !-)

-- 
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for
p in 'onurb at xiludom.gro'.split('@')])"