##Table of ways to speed up your code
| Instead of ... | Do | Why | When to use the slower code |
|---|---|---|---|
| readlines() | Loop over the file | readlines reads in the whole file at once, which takes a lot of memory. When you loop, you can start processing the data immediately, which saves time, and allows you to save smaller subsets of the file in memory, if you wish | When you really quick want to visualize the file at the interpreter |
| declaring and making a list | list comprehension | These run in the C language, which makes them faster | For readability. If your code will be read by novices, it might be best to keep it simple |
| open | with open | this is not a speed-up per se, but prevents us from having to remember to close our loops | Again, readability. |