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From: Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 5 May 2015 14:30:50 -0600
Subject: Re: Throw the cat among the pigeons
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On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 12:45 PM, Dave Angel <davea@davea.name> wrote:
> When the "simple" is True, the function takes noticeably and consistently
> longer.  For example, it might take 116 instead of 109 seconds.  For the
> same counts, your code took 111.

I can't replicate this. What version of Python is it, and what value
of x are you testing with?

> I've looked at dis.dis(factorial_iterative), and can see no explicit reason
> for the difference.

My first thought is that maybe it's a result of the branch. Have you
tried swapping the branches, or reimplementing as separate functions
and comparing?