Memoization and encapsulation
Raymond Hettinger
python at rcn.com
Sat Dec 31 00:09:38 EST 2005
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> I was playing around with simple memoization and came up with something
> like this:
>
> _cache = {}
> def func(x):
> global _cache
> if _cache.has_key(x):
> return _cache[x]
> else:
> result = x+1 # or a time consuming calculation...
> _cache[x] = result
> return result
>
> when it hit me if I could somehow bind the cache to the function, I could
> get rid of that pesky global variable.
Try something like this:
def func(x, _cache={}):
if x in _cache:
return _cache[x]
result = x + 1 # or a time consuming function
_cache[x] = result
return result
* If cache hits are the norm, then a try/except version would be a bit
faster.
* In your original code, the global declaration wasn't needed because
the assigment to _cache wasn't changed, rather its contents were.
Raymond
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