How can I optimize this Python code to generate all words with word-distance 1?

Question

Profiling shows this is the slowest segment of my code for a little word game I wrote:

def distance(word1, word2):
    difference = 0
    for i in range(len(word         


        

Answer 1

for this snippet:

for x,y in zip (word1, word2):
    if x != y:
        difference += 1
return difference

i'd use this one:

return sum(1 for i in xrange(len(word1)) if word1[i] == word2[i])

the same pattern would follow all around the provided code...