Other tips and tricks
The tips mentioned earlier are some of the most common techniques to optimize a program. Some of them are Python specific (such as string concatenation or using ctypes) and others are more generic (such as memoization and lookup tables).
There are still a few more minor tips and tricks specific to Python, which we will cover here. They might not yield a significant boost of speed, but they will shed some more light into the inner workings of the language:
- Membership testing: When trying to figure out if a value is inside a list (we use the word "list" generically here, not specifically referencing the type
list), something such as "a in b", we would have better results using sets and dictionaries (with a lookup time of O(1) ...
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