[Tutor] concat vs join - followup

[Kent Johnson]

At 07:53 AM 8/28/2004 +0100, Alan Gauld wrote:
> > It's good to teach best practices, but maybe it's a poor use of time
>to
> > teach this to beginners. I won't be so quick to bring it up next
>time.
>
>Yes, when someone has a performamce problem, that's probably the
>best time to introduce tuning tricks. Until then, if its "fast enough"
>why bother?

Ah, of course. That's probably the most useful way to think about it - it's 
an optimization, use it when you know you need it.

>But OTOH the research to find out is interesting.

Yes. It was a good excuse to try out VPython's graphing capability, too :-)

>As a matter of interest I usually use string fomatting
>to build long strings rather than join or concatenation.
>How does that compare for performance? :-)

You don't use string formatting to append in a loop do you?

Kent