Issue 1533909: Let timeit accept functions (original) (raw)

I see that there is a history of proposed (and rejected) patches to allow timeit to see various module global namespaces, etc. But I'm surprised that no one has proposed the obvious functional solution: allow the arguments (particularly 'stmt') to be functions that get called, instead of strings that get parsed and executed. This does increase the measurement overhead slightly, adding in the function call, but in many cases it is far more useful within scripts. To time some part of the code, you can replace a function call 'foo()' with 'timeit.Timer(foo).timeit()'.

I also propose helper functions for use within scripts: timeit.timeit(...) is shorthand for timeit.Timer(...).timeit(...), and timeit.repeat(...) is shorthand for timeit.Timer(...).repeat(...). Now you can replace a function call 'foo()' with 'timeit.timeit(foo)', e.g., 'print "foo takes", timeit.timeit(foo), "seconds"'.

Attached is a simple patch implementing both of these changes. Documentation would need updating too.