Python supports a couple of looping constructs. The for statement is most commonly used. It loops over the elements of a sequence, assigning each to the loop variable. If the body of your loop is simple, the interpreter overhead of the for loop itself can be a substantial amount of the overhead. This is where the map function is handy. You can think of map as a for moved into C code. The only restriction is that the "loop body" of map must be a function call. Here's a straight forward example. Instead of looping over a list of words and convert ing them to upper case: Code: newlist= [] for word in list: newlist.append(word.upper()) you can use map to push the loop from the interpreter into compiled C code: Code: import string newlist = map(string.upper, list) List comprehensions were added to Python in version 2.0 as well. They provide a syntactically more compact way of writing the above for loop: Code: newlist = [s.upper() for s in list]
