Peephole optimizations on CPython?

Question

http://www.python.org/workshops/1998-11/proceedings/papers/montanaro/montanaro.html

Just wanted to clarify whether CPython already includes these kind of byte code optimizations? Are all the temporary variables removed when byte code is generated?

Answer 1

You can check these things for yourself:

import dis
dis.dis(function)

will show you the byte code.

But in general, I would expect not. CPython (that's the Python you probably use) doesn't do a lot of optimization apart from some simple constant folding. If you're interested in optimizing Python, you should look at the JIT optimizing Python compiler, PyPy.