Re: Stack Overflow moderator “animuson”

[Joshua Landau]

On 10 July 2013 18:15, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Jul 2013 16:54:02 +0100, Joshua Landau wrote:
>
>> On 10 July 2013 10:00, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 10 Jul 2013 07:55:05 +0000, Mats Peterson wrote:
>>>
>>>> A moderator who calls himself “animuson” on Stack Overflow doesn’t
>>>> want to face the truth. He has deleted all my postings regarding
>>>> Python regular expression matching being extremely slow compared to
>>>> Perl.
>>>
>>> That's by design. We don't want to make the same mistake as Perl, where
>>> every problem is solved by a regular expression:
>>>
>>> http://neilk.net/blog/2000/06/01/abigails-regex-to-test-for-prime-
> numbers/
>>>
>>> so we deliberately make regexes as slow as possible so that programmers
>>> will look for a better way to solve their problem. If you check the
>>> source code for the re engine, you'll find that for certain regexes, it
>>> busy-waits for anything up to 30 seconds at a time, deliberately
>>> wasting cycles.
>>
>> I hate to sound like this but do you realise that this is exactly what
>> you're arguing for when saying that sum() shouldn't use "+="?
>
> You're referencing an off-list conversation, which will probably confuse
> most others reading this.
>
> I don't agree with that. Apart from one throw-away comment where I said
> that sometimes it is handy to have a trivial example of an O(N**2)
> algorithm for teaching purposes, I have never made any suggestion that
> having sum(lists) be slow was a good thing in and of itself.

I might be misattributing posts then. Or... YOU'RE IN DENIAL!

Who wins? You decide!