[Python-Dev] Re: Re: 2.4 news reaches interesting places (original) (raw)

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Mon Dec 13 21:57:07 CET 2004

That's right - when I talk to fellow programmers that I'm writing software in Python, many of them are amazed and ask me, "but isn't it slow?". I've heard it more than once...

I heard it last month.

In the last couple of months, an acquaintance of mine has been trying out Python. He likes the language, particularly the support for character sets, but has (apparently) given up after benchmarking a typical (for him) task against Perl. The task is to use the "re" package to heavily modify a file by a sequence of re substitutions. Apparently the Python program, which applies the same re substitutions in the same order as the Perl program, takes 3 times as long to run. He thinks it's because of mutable strings in Perl -- that is, he thinks the string being modified (which is long, a whole file full of text) is modified in place in Perl, but has to be re-consed in Python.

Bill

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