What is the difference between range and xrange functions in Python 2.X?

Question

Apparently xrange is faster but I have no idea why it\'s faster (and no proof besides the anecdotal so far that it is faster) or what besides that is different about

Answer 1

Do spend some time with the Library Reference. The more familiar you are with it, the faster you can find answers to questions like this. Especially important are the first few chapters about builtin objects and types.

The advantage of the xrange type is that an xrange object will always take the same amount of memory, no matter the size of the range it represents. There are no consistent performance advantages.

Another way to find quick information about a Python construct is the docstring and the help-function:

print xrange.__doc__ # def doc(x): print x.__doc__ is super useful
help(xrange)