Simplifying
To reduce the complexity of code, the way data is stored is fundamental. You should pick your data structure carefully. This section provides a few examples on how the performance of simple code snippets can be improved by the proper datatypes for the job.
Searching in a list
Due to implementation details of the list type in Python, searching for a specific value in a list isn't a cheap operation. The complexity of the list.index() method is O(n), where n is the number of list elements. Such linear complexity is not especially bad if you don't need to perform many element index lookups, but it can have a negative performance impact if there is a need for many such operations.
If you need fast search over a list, you can try the bisect module from the Python standard library. The functions in this module are mainly designed for inserting or finding insertion indexes for given values in a way that will preserve the order of the already sorted sequence. Anyway, they can...
