Advantage of the array module over lists?

[Tobiah]

I checked out the array module today.  It claims that
arrays are 'efficient'.  I figured that this must mean
that they are faster than lists, but this doesn't seem
to be the case:

################ one.py ##############
import array

a = array.array('i')

for x in xrange(10000000):
        a.append(x)

for x in a:
        a[x] += 1

################ two.py ##############
a = []

for x in xrange(10000000):
        a.append(x)

for x in a:
        a[x] += 1

######################################


ktops:toby:pytest> time python one.py; time python two.py

real    0m28.116s
user    0m17.504s
sys     0m10.435s

real    0m23.026s
user    0m13.027s
sys     0m9.777s


Perhaps the only advantage is that they take less memory
to store a large number of items?  It would seem then, that
'economical' might have been a better choice of word than
'efficient'.

Thanks,

Toby


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