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Decorators not worth the effort

andrea crotti andrea.crotti.0 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 14 12:15:35 EDT 2012 
2012/9/14 Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:
>
> Trouble is, you're starting with a pretty poor algorithm. It's easy to
> improve on what's poor. Memoization can still help, but I would start
> with a better algorithm, such as:
>
> def fib(n):
>         if n<=1: return 1
>         a,b=1,1
>         for i in range(1,n,2):
>                 a+=b
>                 b+=a
>         return b if n%2 else a
>
> def fib(n,cache=[1,1]):
>         if n<=1: return 1
>         while len(cache)<=n:
>                 cache.append(cache[-1] + cache[-2])
>         return cache[n]
>
> Personally, I don't mind (ab)using default arguments for caching, but
> you could do the same sort of thing with a decorator if you prefer. I
> think the non-decorated non-recursive version is clear and efficient
> though.
>
> ChrisA
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


The poor algorithm is much more close to the mathematical definition
than the smarter iterative one..  And in your second version you
include some ugly caching logic inside it, so why not using a
decorator then?

I'm not saying that with the memoization is the "good" solution, just
that I think it's a very nice example of how to use a decorator, and
maybe a good example to start with a talk on decorators..
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