Performance of lists vs. list comprehensions

[Gerald Britton]

[snip]

>
> Yes, list building from a generator expression *is* expensive. And
> join has to do it, because it has to iterate twice over the iterable
> passed in: once for calculating the memory needed for the joined
> string, and once more to actually do the join (this is implementation
> dependent, of course). If the iterable is a list already, the list
> building is not needed.

if join has to iterate twice over the iterable, how does this work?

$ python3.1
Python 3.1.1+ (r311:74480, Nov  2 2009, 14:49:22)
[GCC 4.4.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> l = map(str, (x for x in range(10) if int(x)%2))
>>> '.'.join(l)
'1.3.5.7.9'
>>>

If join had to iterate twice over l, it would be consumed on the first
pass.  If it works as you say then join would have to copy the
iterable on the first pass, effectively turning it into a list.
Though I didn't read through it, I would suppose that join could use a
dynamic-table approach to hold the result, starting with some
guesstimate then expanding the result buffer if and when needed.

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-- 
Gerald Britton