Which is faster?

[Lie]

On Aug 30, 5:30 pm, cnb <circularf... at yahoo.se> wrote:
> how does doing something twice not change complexity? yes it maybe
> belongs to the same complexity-class but is still twice as slow no?

Who is doing something twice? Definitely not sum().

sum() does not create intermediate list, and if you pass generator
expressions in it you wouldn't make any intermediate list at all, thus
simple looping but in interpreter code. sum() that is passed a list
comprehension should be faster for extremely small numbers of values
to sum, but we don't care about small things, do we? But using
intermediate list should be fast enough for even large numbers of
values, the time when it can't cope anymore would be when the
intermediate list takes half of your memory (how often is that for
regular applications?).