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According to archive.org this essay is from at most June 2006, which would put it at Python 2.4 or earlier. The specific performance characteristics of Python will have changed greatly in the intervening period.

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The last sentence (grep for "since this essay was written") suggests that the article was written before the 'B' typecode was added to the array module.

This typecode was added in Python 1.5.

Thanks for finding this out, it explains a lot. IIRC, the str += optimization was added in 2.6 which would have made f1 quite fast.

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