Why is it slower to iterate over a small string than a small list?

Question

I was playing around with timeit and noticed that doing a simple list comprehension over a small string took longer than doing the same operation on a list of small single c

Answer 1

You could be incurring and overhead for creating the iterator for the string. Whereas the array already contains an iterator upon instantiation.

EDIT:

>>> timeit("[x for x in ['a','b','c']]")
0.3818681240081787
>>> timeit("[x for x in 'abc']")
0.3732869625091553

This was ran using 2.7, but on my mac book pro i7. This could be the result of a system configuration difference.