Performance of int/long in Python 3

[Ned Deily]

But you are an idiot.

I repeat the friendly reminder I posted a few weeks ago and I'll be a
little less oblique: please avoid gratuitous personal attacks here. It
reflects badly on the group and especially on those people making them.
We can disagree strongly about technical opinions without resorting to
such.

 

[Mark Lawrence]

I repeat the friendly reminder I posted a few weeks ago and I'll be a
little less oblique: please avoid gratuitous personal attacks here. It
reflects badly on the group and especially on those people making them.
We can disagree strongly about technical opinions without resorting to
such.

I suggest you spend more time telling the troll that he's a troll and
less time moaning at me.

 

[Ned Deily]

On 27/03/2013 00:00, Ned Deily wrote: [...]

I repeat the friendly reminder I posted a few weeks ago and I'll be a
little less oblique: please avoid gratuitous personal attacks here. It
reflects badly on the group and especially on those people making them.
We can disagree strongly about technical opinions without resorting to
such.

I suggest you spend more time telling the troll that he's a troll and
less time moaning at me.

I suggest you re-read the group charter. He may be saying things that
most of us disagree with but he does it without personal attacks. He's
made his position clear and it doesn't seem likely to change. Ignoring,
plonking, or polite responses are all fine responses. Flaming is not.
That's not the kind of group most of us want to see.

 

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

No, it doesn't. I'm fairly confident that most of them are not...
however, I have my eye on 42. He gets around, a bit, but never seems
to do anything very useful. I'd think twice before hiring him.

But 1, now, he's a good fellow. Even when things get divisive, he's
the voice of unity.

Unless he's also #6 (in which case #2 is in for trouble)

 

[rurpy]

But you are an idiot.

I repeat the friendly reminder I posted a few weeks ago and I'll be a
little less oblique: please avoid gratuitous personal attacks here. It
reflects badly on the group and especially on those people making them.
We can disagree strongly about technical opinions without resorting to
such.
[..]

+1, thank you for posting that.

 

[Mark Lawrence]

On 27/03/2013 00:00, Ned Deily wrote: [...]

I repeat the friendly reminder I posted a few weeks ago and I'll be a
little less oblique: please avoid gratuitous personal attacks here. It
reflects badly on the group and especially on those people making them.
We can disagree strongly about technical opinions without resorting to
such.

On Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:13:16 -0700, I posted:
A friendly reminder that this forum is for general discussion and
questions about Python.

"Pretty much anything Python-related is fair game for discussion, and
the group is even fairly tolerant of off-topic digressions; there have
been entertaining discussions of topics such as floating point, good
software design, and other programming languages such as Lisp and Forth."

But ...

"Rudeness and personal attacks, even in reaction to blatant flamebait,
are strongly frowned upon. People may strongly disagree on an issue, but
usually discussion remains civil. In case of an actual flamebait
posting, you can ignore it, quietly plonk the offending poster in your
killfile or mail filters, or write a sharp but still-polite response,
but at all costs resist the urge to flame back."

http://www.python.org/community/lists/

It's up to all of us to help keep this group/list a place where people
enjoy participating, without fear of gratuitous personal sniping.
Thanks!

I suggest you spend more time telling the troll that he's a troll and
less time moaning at me.

I suggest you re-read the group charter. He may be saying things that
most of us disagree with but he does it without personal attacks. He's
made his position clear and it doesn't seem likely to change. Ignoring,
plonking, or polite responses are all fine responses. Flaming is not.
That's not the kind of group most of us want to see.

He's not going to change so neither am I.

I also suggest you go and moan at Steven D'Aprano who called the idiot a
liar. Although thinking about it, I prefer Steven's comment to my own
as being more accurate.

 

[jmfauth]

I think we all agree that jmf is a character.

------

The characters are also "intrisic characteristics" of a
group in the Group Theory.

If you are not a mathematician, but eg a scientist in
need of these characters, they are available in
"precalculated" tables, one shorly calls ... "Tables of
characters" !
(My booklet of the tables is titled "Tables for Group Theory")


Example in chemistry, mainly "quantum chemistry":

Group Theory and its Application to Chemistry
http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Physical_Chemistry/Symmetry/Group_Theory:_Application

(Copied link from Firefox).

jmf

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

He's not going to change so neither am I.

"He's a troll disrupting the newsgroup, therefore I'm going to be a troll
disrupting the newsgroup too, so nyah!!!"

I also suggest you go and moan at Steven D'Aprano who called the idiot a
liar. Although thinking about it, I prefer Steven's comment to my own
as being more accurate.

Yes I did, I suggest you reflect on the difference in content between
your post and mine, and why yours can be described as abusive flaming and
mine shouldn't be.

 

[Ethan Furman]

I wouldn't call it unproductive -- a half-dozen amusing posts followed because of Mark's initial post, and they were a
great relief from the tedium and (dare I say it?) idiocy of jmf's posts.

"He's a troll disrupting the newsgroup, therefore I'm going to be a troll
disrupting the newsgroup too, so nyah!!!"

So long as Mark doesn't start cussing and swearing I'm not going to get worked up about it. I find jmf's posts for more
aggravating.

Yes I did, I suggest you reflect on the difference in content between
your post and mine, and why yours can be described as abusive flaming and
mine shouldn't be.

Mark's post was not, in my not-so-humble opinion, abusive. jmf's (again IMNSHO) was.

Your post (Steven's) was possibly more accurate, but Mark's was more amusing, and generated more amusing responses.

Clearly, jmf is not going to change his thread-hijacking unicode-whining behavior, whether faced with the cold rational
responses or the hotter fed-up responses.

So I guess what I'm saying is: Don't Feed The Trolls (Anyone!)

Of course, somebody still has to reply so a newcomer doesn't get taken in by him.

Has anybody else thought that his last few responses are starting to sound bot'ish?

 

[Chris Angelico]

Has anybody else thought that [jmf's] last few responses are starting to sound
bot'ish?

Yes, I did wonder. It's like he and Dihedral have been trading
accounts sometimes. Hey, Dihedral, I hear there's a discussion of
Unicode and PEP 393 and Python 3.3 and Unicode and lots of keywords
for you to trigger on and Python and bots are funny and this text is
almost grammatical!

There. Let's see if he takes the bait.

ChrisA

 

[rusi]

So long as Mark doesn't start cussing and swearing I'm not going to get worked up about it.  I
find jmf's posts for more aggravating.

I support Ned's original gentle reminder -- Please be civil
irrespective of surrounding nonsensical behavior.

In particular "You are a liar" is as bad as "You are an idiot"
The same statement can be made non-abusively thus: "... is not true
because ..."

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

I support Ned's original gentle reminder -- Please be civil irrespective
of surrounding nonsensical behavior.

In particular "You are a liar" is as bad as "You are an idiot" The same
statement can be made non-abusively thus: "... is not true because ..."

I accept that criticism, even if I disagree with it. Does that make
sense? I mean it in the sense that I accept that your opinion differs
from mine.

Politeness does not always trump honesty, and stating that somebody's
statement "is not true because..." is not the same as stating that they
are deliberately telling lies (rather than merely being mistaken or
confused).

The world is full of people who deliberately and in complete awareness of
what they are doing lie in order to further their agenda, or for profit,
or to feel good about themselves, or to harm others. There comes a time
where politely ignoring the elephant in the room (the dirty, rotten,
lying scoundrel of an elephant) and giving them the benefit of the doubt
simply makes life worse for everyone except the liars.

We all know this. Unless you've been living in a cave on the top of some
mountain, we all know people whose relationship to the truth is, shall we
say, rather bendy. And yet we collectively muddy the water and inject
uncertainty into debate by politely going along with their lies, or at
least treating them with dignity that they don't deserve, by treating
them as at worst a matter of honest misunderstanding or even mere
difference of opinion.

As an Australian, I am constitutionally required to call a spade a bloody
shovel at least twice a week, so I have no regrets.

 

[rusi]

I accept that criticism, even if I disagree with it. Does that make
sense? I mean it in the sense that I accept that your opinion differs
from mine.

Politeness does not always trump honesty, and stating that somebody's
statement "is not true because..." is not the same as stating that they
are deliberately telling lies (rather than merely being mistaken or
confused).

The world is full of people who deliberately and in complete awareness of
what they are doing lie in order to further their agenda, or for profit,
or to feel good about themselves, or to harm others. There comes a time
where politely ignoring the elephant in the room (the dirty, rotten,
lying scoundrel of an elephant) and giving them the benefit of the doubt
simply makes life worse for everyone except the liars.

We all subscribe to legal systems that decide the undecidable; eg.
A pulled out a gun and killed B.
Was it murder, manslaughter, just a mistake, euthanasia?
Any lawyer with experience knows that horrible mistakes happen in
making these decisions; yet they (the judges) need to make them.
For the purposes of the python list these ascriptions to personal
motives are OT enough to be out of place.

We all know this. Unless you've been living in a cave on the top of some
mountain, we all know people whose relationship to the truth is, shall we
say, rather bendy. And yet we collectively muddy the water and inject
uncertainty into debate by politely going along with their lies, or at
least treating them with dignity that they don't deserve, by treating
them as at worst a matter of honest misunderstanding or even mere
difference of opinion.

As an Australian, I am constitutionally required to call a spade a bloody
shovel at least twice a week, so I have no regrets.

If someone has got physically injured by the spade then its a bloody
spade; else you are a bloody liar

Well… More seriously Ive never seen anyone -- cause or person -- aided
by the use of excessively strong language.

IOW I repeat my support for Ned's request: Ad hominiem attacks are not
welcome, irrespective of the context/provocation.

 

[Ethan Furman]

In particular "You are a liar" is as bad as "You are an idiot"
The same statement can be made non-abusively thus: "... is not true
because ..."

I don't agree. With all the posts and micro benchmarks and other drivel that jmf has inflicted on us, I find it /very/
hard to believe that he forgot -- which means he was deliberately lying.

At some point we have to stop being gentle / polite / politically correct and call a shovel a shovel... er, spade.

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

More seriously Ive never seen anyone -- cause or person -- aided by
the use of excessively strong language.

Of course not. By definition, if it helps, it wasn't *excessively* strong
language.

IOW I repeat my support for Ned's request: Ad hominiem attacks are not
welcome, irrespective of the context/provocation.

Insults are not ad hominem attacks.

"You sir, are a bounder and a cad. Furthermore, your
argument is wrong, because of reasons."

may very well be an insult, but it also may be correct, and the reasons
logically valid.

"Your argument is wrong, because you are a bounder
and a cad."

is an ad hominem fallacy, because even bounders and cads may tell the
truth occasionally, or be correct by accident.

I find it interesting that nobody has yet felt the need to defend JMF,
and tell me I was factually incorrect about him (as opposed to merely
impolite or mean-spirited).

In any case, I don't want this to be specifically about any one person,
so let's move away from JMF. I disagree that hostile language is *always*
inappropriate, although I agree that it is *usually* inappropriate.

Although even that depends on what you define as "hostile" -- I would
much prefer that people confronted me for being (supposedly) dishonest
than silently shunning me without giving me any way to respond or correct
either my behaviour or their (mis)apprehensions. Quite frankly, I think
that the passive-aggressive silent treatment (kill-filing) is MUCH more
hostile and mean-spirited[1] than honest, respectful, direct criticism,
even when that criticism is about character ("you sir are a lying
scoundrel").

I treat people the way I hope to be treated. As galling as it would be to
be accused of lying, I would rather that you called me a liar to my face
and gave me the opportunity to respond, than for you to ignore everything
I said.

I hope that we all agree that we want a nice, friendly, productive
community where everyone is welcome. But some people simply cannot or
will not behave in ways that are compatible with those community values.
There are some people whom we *do not want here* -- spoilers and messers,
vandals and spammers and cheats and liars and trolls and crackpots of all
sorts. We only disagree as to the best way to make it clear to them that
they are not welcome so long as they continue their behaviour.



[1] Although sadly, given the reality of communication on the Internet,
sometimes kill-filing is the least-worst option.

 

[jmfauth]

I don't agree.  With all the posts and micro benchmarks and other drivel that jmf has inflicted on us, I find it /very/
hard to believe that he forgot -- which means he was deliberately lying.

At some point we have to stop being gentle / polite / politically correctand call a shovel a shovel... er, spade.

-----------

The problem is elsewhere. Nobody understand the examples
I gave on this list, because nobody understand Unicode.
These examples are not random examples, they are well
thought.

If you were understanding the coding of the characters,
Unicode and what this flexible representation does, it
would not be a problem for you to create analog examples.

So, we are turning into circles.

This flexible representation succeeds to cumulate in one
shoot all the design mistakes it is possible to do, when
one wishes to implements Unicode.

Example of a good Unicode understanding.
If you wish 1) to preserve memory, 2) to cover the whole range
of Unicode, 3) to keep maximum performance while preserving the
good work Unicode.org as done (normalization, sorting), there
is only one solution: utf-8. For this you have to understand,
what is really a "unicode transformation format".

Why all the actors, active in the "text field", like MicroSoft,
Apple, Adobe, the unicode compliant TeX engines, the foundries,
the "organisation" in charge of the OpenType font specifications,
are able to handle all this stuff correctly (understanding +
implementation) and Python not?, I should say this is going
beyond my understanding.

Python has certainly and definitvely not "revolutionize"
Unicode.

jmf

 

[Ian Foote]

The problem is elsewhere. Nobody understand the examples
I gave on this list, because nobody understand Unicode.
These examples are not random examples, they are well
thought.

If you were understanding the coding of the characters,
Unicode and what this flexible representation does, it
would not be a problem for you to create analog examples.

So, we are turning into circles.

This flexible representation succeeds to cumulate in one
shoot all the design mistakes it is possible to do, when
one wishes to implements Unicode.

Example of a good Unicode understanding.
If you wish 1) to preserve memory, 2) to cover the whole range
of Unicode, 3) to keep maximum performance while preserving the
good work Unicode.org as done (normalization, sorting), there
is only one solution: utf-8. For this you have to understand,
what is really a "unicode transformation format".

Why all the actors, active in the "text field", like MicroSoft,
Apple, Adobe, the unicode compliant TeX engines, the foundries,
the "organisation" in charge of the OpenType font specifications,
are able to handle all this stuff correctly (understanding +
implementation) and Python not?, I should say this is going
beyond my understanding.

Python has certainly and definitvely not "revolutionize"
Unicode.

jmf

You're confusing python's choice of internal string representation with
the programmer's choice of encoding for communicating with other programs.

I think most people agree that utf-8 is usually the best encoding to use
for interoperating with other unicode aware software, but as a
variable-length encoding it has disadvantages that make it unsuitable
for use as an internal representation.

Specifically, indexing a variable-length encoding like utf-8 is not as
efficient as indexing a fixed-length encoding.

Regards,
Ian F

 

[Oscar Benjamin]

The problem is elsewhere. Nobody understand the examples
I gave on this list, because nobody understand Unicode.
These examples are not random examples, they are well
thought.

There are many people here and among the Python devs who understand
unicode. Similarly they have understood the examples that you have
given. It has been accepted that there are a handful of cases where
performance has been reduced as a result of the change. There are also
many cases where the performance has improved. It is certainly not
clear that there is an *overall* performance reduction for people
using non latin-1 characters as you have often suggested.

The reason your initial posts received a poor reception is that they
were accompanied with pointless rants and arrogant claims that no one
understood the problem. Had you simply reported the timing differences
without the rants then I imagine that you would have received a
response like "Okay, there might be a few regressions. Can you open an
issue on the tracker please?".

Since then you have been relentlessly hijacking unrelated threads and
this is clearly just trolling.

If you were understanding the coding of the characters,
Unicode and what this flexible representation does, it
would not be a problem for you to create analog examples.

So, we are turning into circles.

This flexible representation succeeds to cumulate in one
shoot all the design mistakes it is possible to do, when
one wishes to implements Unicode.

This is clearly untrue.The most significant design mistakes are the
ones that lead to incorrect handling of unicode characters. This new
implementation in Python 3.3 has been designed in a way that makes it
possible to handle all unicode characters correctly.

Example of a good Unicode understanding.
If you wish 1) to preserve memory, 2) to cover the whole range
of Unicode, 3) to keep maximum performance while preserving the
good work Unicode.org as done (normalization, sorting), there
is only one solution: utf-8. For this you have to understand,
what is really a "unicode transformation format".

Again you pretend that others here don't understand. Most people here
are well aware of utf-8 is. Your suggestion that "maximum performance"
would be achieved if Python use utf-8 internally ignores the fact that
it would have many negative performance implications for slicing and
indexing and so on.

Why all the actors, active in the "text field", like MicroSoft,
Apple, Adobe, the unicode compliant TeX engines, the foundries,
the "organisation" in charge of the OpenType font specifications,
are able to handle all this stuff correctly (understanding +
implementation) and Python not?, I should say this is going
beyond my understanding.

Python has certainly and definitvely not "revolutionize"
Unicode.

Perhaps not, but it does now correctly handle all unicode characters
(unlike many other languages and pieces of software).


Oscar

 

[Chris Angelico]

I accept that criticism, even if I disagree with it. Does that make
sense? I mean it in the sense that I accept that your opinion differs
from mine.

Politeness does not always trump honesty, and stating that somebody's
statement "is not true because..." is not the same as stating that they
are deliberately telling lies (rather than merely being mistaken or
confused).

There comes a time when a bit of rudeness is a small cost to pay for
forum maintenance. Before you criticize someone for nit-picking, think
what happens when someone reads the thread archive. Of course, that
particular example can be done courteously too - cf the "def" vs
"class" nit from a recent thread. But it'd still be of value even if
done rudely, so the hundreds of subsequent readers would have a chance
to know what's going on. I was researching a problem with ALSA a
couple of weeks ago, and came across a forum thread that discussed
exactly what I needed to know. A dozen or so courteous posts delivered
misinformation; finally someone had the guts to be rude and call
people out for posting incorrect points (and got criticized for doing
so), and that one post was the most useful in the whole thread.

I'd rather this list have some vinegar than it devolve into
uselessness. Or, worse, if there's a hard-and-fast rule about
courtesy, devolve into aspartame... everyone's courteous in words but
hates each other underneath. Or am I taking the analogy too far?

ChrisA

 

[Mark Lawrence]

I wouldn't call it unproductive -- a half-dozen amusing posts followed
because of Mark's initial post, and they were a great relief from the
tedium and (dare I say it?) idiocy of jmf's posts.

Thanks for those words. They're a tonic as I've just clawed my way out
of bed at 12:00 GMT having slept for 15 hours.

Once the PEP393 unicode debacle has been sorted, does anyone have a cure
for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?