It looks very much like some techniques used when minifying JavaScript.
replyAs they say in TDD, write a test, then write the simplest code that will make it pass.
replyClearly supporting multiple functions starting with 'p' would be overengineering.
By that standard, this is totally over-engineered. Just hardcode it.
replyIf you are willing to sacrifice performance, you can implement dicts via linear lookup in much less code than a proper hash table.
replyBecause Python dicts guarantee iteration order is the same as insertion order (https://docs.python.org/3.7/library/stdtypes.html#typesmappi...) Python dicts aren’t just proper hash tables.
replyBecause of that it wouldn’t surprise me much if that sped up some standard benchmarks, for example ones parsing lots of small json objects into dictionaries.
It’s Python, you’ve already sacrificed performance, what a little bit more?
replyThat's the spirit!
reply(Slightly less silly: the folks at https://github.com/faster-cpython are doing great work, too.)
Are they still? I thought this project was no longer really active.
replyReminds me of the good 'ol Apple II BASIC. You can name your variables whatever you want, but only the first two letters matter.
replyTwo letters is luxury, when most BASIC interpreters in those days only recognised 1-letter variables.
reply> Any "w" is a "while"
replyMeaning that something as simple as "w = 4" would fail? A little too nasty for my liking. Not a choice I would have made, but admire the amount of work done here and the readability of the article. And it's more human-written code than I've done in a number of months!