Keyword arguments passed to builtin functions that don't take them are
ignored.
>>> {}.clear(x=2)
>>>
instead of
>>> {}.clear(x=2)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: clear() takes no keyword arguments
Added information on PyIter_Check(), PyIter_Next(),
PyObject_Unicode(), PyString_AsDecodedObject(),
PyString_AsEncodedObject(), and PyThreadState_GetDict().
state *which* other function the current one is like, even if the
descriptions are adjacent.
Revise the _PyTuple_Resize() description to reflect the removal of the
third parameter.
updatecache(): When using imputil, sys.path may contain things other than
strings. Ignore such things instead of blowing up.
Hard to say whether this is a bugfix or a feature ...
instead of multiplication to generate the probe sequence. The idea is
recorded in Python-Dev for Dec 2000, but that version is prone to rare
infinite loops.
The value is in getting *all* the bits of the hash code to participate;
and, e.g., this speeds up querying every key in a dict with keys
[i << 16 for i in range(20000)] by a factor of 500. Should be equally
valuable in any bad case where the high-order hash bits were getting
ignored.
Also wrote up some of the motivations behind Python's ever-more-subtle
hash table strategy.
resizing.
Accurate timings are impossible on my Win98SE box, but this is obviously
faster even on this box for reasonable list.append() cases. I give
credit for this not to the resizing strategy but to getting rid of integer
multiplication and divsion (in favor of shifting) when computing the
rounded-up size.
For unreasonable list.append() cases, Win98SE now displays linear behavior
for one-at-time appends up to a list with about 35 million elements. Then
it dies with a MemoryError, due to fatally fragmented *address space*
(there's plenty of VM available, but by this point Win9X has broken user
space into many distinct heaps none of which has enough contiguous space
left to resize the list, and for whatever reason Win9x isn't coalescing
the dead heaps). Before the patch it got a MemoryError for the same
reason, but once the list reached about 2 million elements.
Haven't yet tried on Win2K but have high hopes extreme list.append()
will be much better behaved now (NT & Win2K didn't fragment address space,
but suffered obvious quadratic-time behavior before as lists got large).
For other systems I'm relying on common sense: replacing integer * and /
by << and >> can't plausibly hurt, the number of function calls hasn't
changed, and the total operation count for reasonably small lists is about
the same (while the operations are cheaper now).
in the table of mapping object operations. Re-numbered the list of
notes to reflect the move of the "Added in version 2.2." note to the list
of notes instead of being inserted into the last column of the table.
dictresize() was too aggressive about never ever resizing small dicts.
If a small dict is entirely full, it needs to rebuild it despite that
it won't actually resize it, in order to purge old dummy entries thus
creating at least one virgin slot (lookdict assumes at least one such
exists).
Also took the opportunity to add some high-level comments to dictresize.
The idea is Marc-Andre Lemburg's, the implementation is Tim's.
Add a new ma_smalltable member to dictobjects, an embedded vector of
MINSIZE (8) dictentry structs. Short course is that this lets us avoid
additional malloc(s) for dicts with no more than 5 entries.
The changes are widespread but mostly small.
Long course: WRT speed, all scalar operations (getitem, setitem, delitem)
on non-empty dicts benefit from no longer needing NULL-pointer checks
(ma_table is never NULL anymore). Bulk operations (copy, update, resize,
clearing slots during dealloc) benefit in some cases from now looping
on the ma_fill count rather than on ma_size, but that was an unexpected
benefit: the original reason to loop on ma_fill was to let bulk
operations on empty dicts end quickly (since the NULL-pointer checks
went away, empty dicts aren't special-cased any more).
Special considerations:
For dicts that remain empty, this change is a lose on two counts:
the dict object contains 8 new dictentry slots now that weren't
needed before, and dict object creation also spends time memset'ing
these doomed-to-be-unsused slots to NULLs.
For dicts with one or two entries that never get larger than 2, it's
a mix: a malloc()/free() pair is no longer needed, and the 2-entry case
gets to use 8 slots (instead of 4) thus decreasing the chance of
collision. Against that, dict object creation spends time memset'ing
4 slots that aren't strictly needed in this case.
For dicts with 3 through 5 entries that never get larger than 5, it's a
pure win: the dict is created with all the space they need, and they
never need to resize. Before they suffered two malloc()/free() calls,
plus 1 dict resize, to get enough space. In addition, the 8-slot
table they ended with consumed more memory overall, because of the
hidden overhead due to the additional malloc.
For dicts with 6 or more entries, the ma_smalltable member is wasted
space, but then these are large(r) dicts so 8 slots more or less doesn't
make much difference. They still benefit all the time from removing
ubiquitous dynamic null-pointer checks, and get a small benefit (but
relatively smaller the larger the dict) from not having to do two
mallocs, two frees, and a resize on the way *to* getting their sixth
entry.
All in all it appears a small but definite general win, with larger
benefits in specific cases. It's especially nice that it allowed to
get rid of several branches, gotos and labels, and overall made the
code smaller.
Jeremy Hylton
Fred Drake
Thomas Wouters
Tim Peters
Jack Jansen
Barry Warsaw
Martin v. Löwis
Guido van Rossum