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

Some of the other answers mention that Python 3 eliminated 2.x's range and renamed 2.x's xrange to range. However, unless you're using 3.0 or 3.1 (which nobody should be), it's actually a somewhat different type.

As the 3.1 docs say:

Range objects have very little behavior: they only support indexing, iteration, and the len function.

However, in 3.2+, range is a full sequence—it supports extended slices, and all of the methods of collections.abc.Sequence with the same semantics as a list.^*

And, at least in CPython and PyPy (the only two 3.2+ implementations that currently exist), it also has constant-time implementations of the index and count methods and the in operator (as long as you only pass it integers). This means writing 123456 in r is reasonable in 3.2+, while in 2.7 or 3.1 it would be a horrible idea.

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_{* The fact that issubclass(xrange, collections.Sequence) returns True in 2.6-2.7 and 3.0-3.1 is a bug that was fixed in 3.2 and not backported.}