Why is code using intermediate variables faster than code without?
Why is code using intermediate variables faster than code without? I have encountered this weird behavior and failed to explain it. These are the benchmarks: py -3 -m timeit "tuple(range(2000)) == tuple(range(2000))" 10000 loops, best of 3: 97.7 usec per loop py -3 -m timeit "a = tuple(range(2000)); b = tuple(range(2000)); a==b" 10000 loops, best of 3: 70.7 usec per loop How come comparison with variable assignment is faster than using a one liner with temporary variables by more than 27%? By the Python docs, garbage collection is disabled during timeit so it can't be that. Is it some sort of an optimization? The results may also be reproduced in Python 2.x though to lesser extent. Running Windows 7, CPython 3.5.1, Intel i7 3.40 GHz, 64 bit both OS and Python. Seems like a different machine I've tried running at Intel i7 3.60 GHz with Python 3.5.0 does not reproduce the results. Running using the same Python process with timeit.timeit() @ 10000 loops produ...