Re: AppendTo VERY slow
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg35317] Re: AppendTo VERY slow
- From: "Carl K. Woll" <carlw at u.washington.edu>
- Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 03:16:25 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: University of Washington
- References: <ag6ed8$bnm$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Mike,
An alternative and often more efficient way to build up a list is to use a
sequence of assignments of the form s = {s, elem}, and then to call Flatten
on the resulting structure.
Due to the way Mathematica handles lists internally, appending items to a
list is exceedingly slow. For further discussion of this subject you could
search the Mathematica newsgroup. For example, search for AppendTo and
Lichtblau for a good starting point.
Carl Woll
Physics Dept
U of Washington
"Mike" <M.P.Croucher at Sheffield.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:ag6ed8$bnm$1 at smc.vnet.net...
> I use lists a lot in mathematica and tend to use AppendTo[] a lot in
> my programs. Recently I wrote a function that i call over and over
> again and found that the results were coming very slowly and i MEAN
> slowly. I was doing Fourier Transforms and all kinds of stuff so I
> put it down to those at first but I have just put in a load of Print
> statements just after each part of the function to see what was taking
> so long.
>
> I was amazed to see that the Fourier Transforms were so quick and what
> was actually taking the time was a part of my function that collected
> the results togther in the form I wanted and outputted the result. It
> looks like this
>
> Do[
> elem = {xlist[[count]], ylist[[count]]]};
> AppendTo[outlist, elem];
> , {count, 1, number}
> ];
>
> It seems that as the list grows it gets slower and slower. Any tips
> on a way around this would be greatly appreciated (would speed my life
> up no end)
>
>
> Thank
>
> Mike
>