What is memoization and how can I use it in Python?

Question

I just started Python and I\'ve got no idea what memoization is and how to use it. Also, may I have a simplified example?

Answer 1

Solution that works with both positional and keyword arguments independently of order in which keyword args were passed (using inspect.getargspec):

import inspect
import functools

def memoize(fn):
    cache = fn.cache = {}
    @functools.wraps(fn)
    def memoizer(*args, **kwargs):
        kwargs.update(dict(zip(inspect.getargspec(fn).args, args)))
        key = tuple(kwargs.get(k, None) for k in inspect.getargspec(fn).args)
        if key not in cache:
            cache[key] = fn(**kwargs)
        return cache[key]
    return memoizer

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