[Python-Dev] Ridiculously minor tweaks? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Tue, 11 Mar 2003 21:11:12 -0500

There are many places in the standard library where some code either iterates over a literal list or checks for membership in a literal list. I'm curious if it would be considered productive and useful to go through and change those places to iterate over/check for membership in literal tuples instead fo lists. The tuple, I think, more closely reflects the read-only literal nature of the code and is slightly faster to boot.

-1.

I bet you can't prove the speed-up.

Tuples are for heterogeneous data, list are for homogeneous data. Tuples are not read-only lists.

Tuples require extra care in case the number of elements shrinks to 1.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)