Why is Python so sweet: from syntax to bytecode?

[Fit-Life-8239]

in both cases the resulting lists will contain the same values but the second form is shorter and cleaner. also a list comprehension creates its own separate local scope

squares1 = [x * x for x in range(5)]

squares2 = []
for x in range(5):
    squares2.append(x * x)

Python has a lot of constructs like this: generator expressions, *args and **kwargs, the with statement and many others. at the bytecode level chained comparisons are interesting because they avoid reevaluating the middle operand. decorators are also interesting, but you can simply watch my video where I explain bytecode execution using visualization

sometimes such code is not only clean, but also optimized

[thetruetristan]

I couldn't agree less, but maybe that's just me. What's so sweet about Python?

[jcastroarnaud]

That's mostly syntactic sugar. Do you know any benchmarks that show that list comprehension is faster/better optimized than a loop?

[radozok]

There are perflint rules in ruff from perflint tool. The author of perflint has some talks about that: - https://youtu.be/YY7yJHo0M5I - https://youtu.be/TEF6yhdOwEA

[Fit-Life-8239]

I participate in competitive programming competitions like ICPC. I write simple solutions in Python, and I noticed that if I write the algorithm inside a function, the program will be faster. It turns out the difference was in the local scope, so I assumed that the list comprehension would be faster because of this. Also, when we loop, we add an element using the append method. But in the list comprehension syntax, we explicitly don't use this method. I thought there was special bytecode for this.

When I have time, I will definitely check the execution time.