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Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 23:07:28 +1100
Subject: Re: New user's initial thoughts / criticisms of Python
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 10:53 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
> Heh. I've done pretty much exactly the same thing to implement an engine[1]
> to draw from the random tables on Abulafia[2] which have nearly the same
> structure. It scales up reasonably well beyond d100s. It's certainly not a
> technique I would pull out to replace one-off if-elif chains that you
> literally write, but it works well when you write the generic code once to
> apply to many tables.

I'd trust my current code for several orders of magnitude beyond where
I'm currently using it, but as Steven said, you really don't want to
be manually looking at the denormalized tables. Since all the strings
are referenced anyway, having a lookup array of (say) 1,000,000 object
pointers is fairly cheap.

>>> lst = ["Low" if i<500000 else "High" for i in range(1000000)]
>>> sys.getsizeof(lst)
4348736

That's pretty close to four bytes per entry, which would be the
cheapest you could hope for on a 32-bit system. 10% overhead is quite
acceptable. And this is a fairly extreme example :)

ChrisA