new to python, help please !!

[Denis McMahon]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2015 17:55:33 +0000, Quivis wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Nov 2015 13:58:35 +1100, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 
>> horribly inefficient
> 
> Assuming it was md5 values, who cares? Those are small.

A file of 160 million md5 hashes as 32 character hex strings is a huge 
file. Your method calculates the hash over both files to test whether the 
contents are different. If the input files are both lists of 160 million 
md5 hashes, you're calculating the hash of two 5 gigabyte files.

In your method the size of the lines of data is irrelevant to the 
execution time, the execution time varies with the size of the datafiles.
-- 
Denis McMahon, denismfmcmahon at gmail.com