Sieve of Eratosthenes, Python, Set Operations

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I pretty much broke down after TechEd. I thought I'd be patient enough to wait for Ruby but because Python is most mature I have started to learn it, whitespaces or no.

The first thing I did was check out Guido van Rossum's tutorial for programmers, which was an excellent first step. I've followed that up with some random programming - a lot of fun so far.

I was wondering about the set operations in python and how that made a difference in programming since there aren't syntactical equivalents in .NET. Incidentally at the time I was reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and ran across a short description of the Sieve of Eratosthenes as a way of finding primes. I thought it would be a good way to check out the set operations of Python.

I wrote the following:

from System import *

def multiples(num, thresh):
 multi = []
 for i in range(2,thresh):
  m = num * i
  if(m < thresh):
   multi.append(m)
  else:
   break
 return multi

primeThresh = 5000
print DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")
nums = range(2,primeThresh)

for n in nums:
 nums = set(nums) - set(multiples(n, primeThresh))

print nums

print DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")

Interesting, but slow. The way I may do something like that in C# (which also works just fine in Python) would be this, which I wrote later:

from System import *

primeThresh = 5000
print DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")
nums = range(2,primeThresh)

for n in nums:
 for m in range(2,primeThresh):
  try:
   mult = n * m
   if(mult > primeThresh):
    break
   nums.remove(mult)
  except:
   pass

print nums

print DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")

It's a lot faster than the previous approach which makes sense - doing set algebra on large sets should take a long time... but that begs the question: are those set operations dangerous (ie. so slow as to be costly).

I'm wondering what's "pythonic" and how a jedi would write this most effeciently.

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