How to increase the speed of this program?

[John Machin]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> John Machin wrote:
>
> > I'm extremely agnostic about the spelling :-) IOW I'd be very glad of
> > any way [pure Python; e.g. maintaining my own version of the array
> > module doesn't qualify] to simply and rapidly create an array.array
> > instance with typecode t and number of elements n with each element
> > initialised to value v (default to be the zero appropriate to the
> > typecode).
>
>      array(t, [v])*n
>
> </F>

Thanks, that's indeed faster than array(t, [v]*n) but what I had in
mind was something like an additional constructor:

array.filledarray(typecode, repeat_value, repeat_count)

which I speculate should be even faster. Looks like I'd better get a
copy of arraymodule.c and start fiddling.

Anyone who could use this? Suggestions on name? Argument order?

Functionality: same as array.array(typecode, [repeat_value]) *
repeat_count. So it would cope with array.filledarray('c', "foo", 10)

I'm presuming an additional constructor would be better than doubling
up on the existing one:

array.array(typecode[, initializer)
and
array.array(typecode[, repeat_value, repeat_count])

Cheers,
John