Take advantage of caching and the lru_cache decorator to relieve your Python functions from repetitive heavy lifting.

In Python, you can define functions with optional arguments — that is, arguments that you don’t need to state explicitly afterwards — by providing a default value.

In Python, the mere act of making a function call incurs a relatively large amount of overhead. If some function is called repeatedly in a tight loop, even if it isn’t a long-running function ...

Often, Python functions ask for or return Python sequence objects, such as tuples or lists. These objects don't have directly corresponding types in C, but Python provides functions that allow you to ...

This article is adapted from an edition of our Off the Charts newsletter originally published in October 2021. Off the Charts is a weekly, subscriber-only guide to The Economist’ s award-winning ...