literals

What does preceding a string literal with “r” mean?

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When an 'r' or 'R' prefix is present,
a character following a backslash is
included in the string without change,
and all backslashes are left in the
string. For example, the string
literal r"n" consists of two
characters: a backslash and a
lowercase 'n'. String quotes can be
escaped with a backslash, but the
backslash remains in the string; for
example, r""" is a valid string
literal consisting of two characters:
a backslash and a double quote; r""
is not a valid string literal (even a
raw string cannot end in an odd number
of backslashes). Specifically, a raw
string cannot end in a single
backslash (since the backslash would
escape the following quote character).
Note also that a single backslash
followed by a newline is interpreted
as those two characters as part of the
string, not as a line continuation.

Why is [] faster than list()?

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I recently compared the processing speeds of [] and list() and was surprised to discover that [] runs more than three times faster than list(). I ran the same test with {} and dict() and the results were practically identical: [] and {} both took around 0.128sec / million cycles, while list() and dict() took roughly 0.428sec / million cycles each.