Python 'for' loop is memory inefficient

[Carl Banks]

On Aug 16, 3:35 pm, sturlamolden <sturlamol... at yahoo.no> wrote:
> On 16 Aug, 14:57, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr... at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> >         Well, the alternative would be to have two keywords for looping: one
> > for your "simple" incrementing integer loop, and another for a loop that
> > operates over the elements of some collection type.
>
> A compiler could easily recognise a statement like
>
>    for i in range(n):
>
> as a simple integer loop.

It would be a simple to do if you were writing it for a different
langauge was a lot less dynamic than Python is.  It'd be quite a
complex hack to add it to CPython's compiler while maintaing the
current highly dynamic runtime semantics and backwards compatibility,
which is a design constraint of Python whether you like it or not.

And all this complaining about an issue that can be worked around by
xrange instead of range.  Sheesh.


> In fact, Cython is able to do this.

Cython can do this easily because it is a different language that is a
lot less dynamic than Python.

If you don't care about the dynamic stuff why don't you just use
Cython?  Or quit complaining and just use xrange.


Carl Banks