Python Idioms and Efficiency外文电子书籍.pdfVIP

Python Idioms and Efficiency 1/28/07 Written by Rob Knight for the Cogent project Table of Contents What idioms should I use to make my code easier to read? What techniques should I use to make my code run faster? Back to the coding guidelines What idioms should I use to make my code easier to read? Read The Python Cookbook, especially the first few chapters. Its a great source of well-written Python code examples. Build strings as a list and use .join at the end. join is a string method called on the separator, not the list. Calling it from the empty string concatenates the pieces with no separator, which is a Python quirk and rather surprising at first. This is important: string building with + is quadratic time instead of linear! If you learn one idiom, learn this one. Wrong: for s in strings: result += s Right: result = .join(strings) Always use an objects capabilities instead of its type. Python is a dynamically typed language: you should basically never care whether an object is a particular type as long as it supports a particular interface. This can give you impressive polymorphism for free. For example, my code for checking whether a string is valid on an alphabet looks like this: for char in string: if char not in alphabet: raise ValueError, Char %s not in alphabet %a % (char, alphabet) It doesnt matter whether alphabet is a string, a dict, a list, or an object that I define as long as it supports the __contains__ special method. Use in wherever possible (you can override __contains__ to support if x in y syntax and __iter__ to support for x in y syntax in your own classes). This keeps your statements general and polymorphic. Better: for key in d: print key #also works for arbitrary sequence Worse: for key in d.keys(): print key #limited to objects with keys() Better: if key not in d: d[key] = [] Worse: if not dict.has_key(key): d[key] = [] Note: you s