Miscellaneous Tips

Measuring the execution time

to meausre how long a program runs, we could use time.clock() in time module

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import time

def time_execution(code):
    start = time.clock()
    result = eval(code)
    run_time = time.clock() - start
    return result, run_time

def spin_loop(n):
    i = 0
    while i < n:
        i = i + 1
[4]:
built-in procedure that provided by time module that evaluates to the number of seconds. Often comes in pair, one sets the timer to start and one to stop the timer.
[5]:
eval takes in a string, and evaluates it as python code.

output:

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In [1]: time_execution('1+1')
Out[1]: (2, 0.0)

In [2]: time_execution('spin_loop(10000000)')
Out[2]: (None, 0.9900000000000002)