[Tutor] Advise...

[Tony Meyer]

[Tony Meyer]
> If the user must be able to enter in the function, then it 
> would be better to evaluate this once and turn it into some 
> sort of function that you can call inside the loop (it's the 
> eval that is so expensive).

I should have included some code that does this:

"""
from __future__ import division
import psyco
psyco.full()
fofx = raw_input("What is the function? ")
minimum = raw_input("What is the minimum? ")
maximum = raw_input("What is the maximum? ")
start = time.time()
minimum = float(minimum)
maximum = float(maximum)
total = 0
step = 100000
x = minimum
a = compile(fofx, '<string>', 'eval')
while minimum <= x <= maximum:
    area = eval(a)/step
    total = total+area
    x = x+1/step
print total
"""

This takes ~1.7 seconds here, so about 8 times faster than without the
compile() call, but about 2.5 times slower than directly with the 3*x*x.

=Tony.Meyer