Calling a function is faster than not calling it?

[BartC]

On 10/05/2015 10:58, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> from timeit import Timer
>
> def func():
>      a = 2
>      b = 3
>      c = 4
>      return (a+b)*(a-b)/(a*c + b*c)
>
>
> code = func.__code__
> assert func() == eval(code)
>
> t1 = Timer("eval; func()", setup="from __main__ import func")
> t2 = Timer("eval(code)", setup="from __main__ import code")
>
> # Best of 10 trials.
> print (min(t1.repeat(repeat=10)))
> print (min(t2.repeat(repeat=10)))

Maybe the overheads of using eval() are significant when calling a 
simple function such as your example.

When I made it do a bit more work:

def func():
     a = 2
     b = 3
     c = 4
     for i in range(50):
         x=(a+b)*(a-b)/(a*c + b*c)
     return (a+b)*(a-b)/(a*c + b*c)

Then the eval() call took only 3% longer rather than 100%.

-- 
Bartc