Assignment saves time?

[Hrvoje Niksic]

rpglover64 at gmail.com writes:

> I tested this using the timeit module, and though the difference was
> small, I would have expected the first code block to do slightly
> worse,

Can you post your entire benchmark, so that we can repeat it?  When I
tried the obvious, I got the expected result:

$ python -m timeit -s 'l=[]' 'len(l)==1000'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.256 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s 'l=[]' 'len(l)==1000'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.27 usec per loop

$ python -m timeit -s 'l=[]' 's=len(l); s==1000'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.287 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s 'l=[]' 's=len(l); s==1000'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.299 usec per loop