(silly?) speed comparisons

[Terry Reedy]

mk wrote:
> Out of curiosity I decided to make some speed comparisons of the same 
> algorithm in Python and C++. Moving slices of lists of strings around 
> seemed like a good test case.

If you use Python to, in effect, call well-written C functions, and most 
of the computation time is spent in the C functions, then the total time 
may be less than using C++ to call C or C++ functions that have not been 
as heavily optimized.  (Python is nearly 2 decades old, and several 
people have perused the code base looking for speedups.)