Entries on November 5, 2006

Programming tips: learn optimization strategies

Recently I spent a little time talking about the tradeoffs between “concise” code and readable code in Python. Throughout that entry, I was using as an example a simple function which calculates numbers in the Fibonacci sequence; here’s one variation: 

def fib(n):
    if n < 2:
        return n
    return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)

The Fibonacci sequence is a classic example from introductory programming materials, because it teaches recursion, and recursion is an ...

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