Simon reported approximately one 100k-iteration line printed per second using Maple. I'm getting approximately six per second. You're getting 25 per second. So no, not faster than Maple by a factor of hundreds.
25 is a factor of hundreds by me :) (0.25 hundreds) It may sound like a joke in England, but here, in America - that's exactly what people usually mean by that. You see a commercial: SAVE MILLIONS and then, lower, it says in a small print: well, hundreds...
It also sounds as if it's about 4 times faster than Python on my machine, which seems odd. (I could believe a factor of 2 more easily.)
Well, that's exactly the results that I got. You may believe them or not. If I compiled Python myself (as I usually do) instead of using one of the most inefficient (ActiveState) implementations, the results would be much better - as I said, hundreds or thousands times better. By the way, that outlines another difference with Maple - with Maple, you get what you get, you can't recompile it, while Python is open source and can be compiled targeted to your (or mine) specific system, with all available optimizations. Alec PS By the way, I am not surprised reading such things as "Really?" or "I could believe a factor of 2 more easily" - I was seeing much worth comments to my posts during last couple of years - Alec