(-1)**1000

[Stefan Behnel]

Ned Batchelder schrieb am 26.10.2014 um 21:45:
> On 10/26/14 4:07 PM, Tony the Tiger wrote:
>> On Wed, 22 Oct 2014 10:27:34 +0200, ast wrote:
>>
>>> If i am writing (-1)**1000 on a python program, will the interpreter do
>>> (-1)*(-1)*...*(-1) or something clever ?
>>
>> Even vs. odd. It ought to know. I would assume from a set of defined
>> rules how math works.
> 
> There is such a thing as an optimization that isn't worthwhile to perform,
> simply because it's expected to provide so little benefit.  The language
> implementors have to trade off the cost of adding the optimization to the
> implementation, against the possible benefit people would get from it.
> 
> Benefit in this case would have to include a guess as to how often real
> programs would hit the optimization case.

... and also compare it to the number of cases where the optimisation
(which may, for example, need to check for an optimisable value or set of
values) slows down the generic (unoptimised) code path that is actually taken.

Even if the code impact on the implementation is small enough to be
acceptable, an optimisation for unlikely cases may provide a net-loss for
the "normal" code. So there are several reasons why an "obvious"
optimisation may be a bad idea.

Stefan