It may be a shorter number of bytecodes, but that does not mean it has better performance. You have two function calls in the range version and only one in the

It may be a shorter number of bytecodes, but that does not mean it has better performance. You have two function calls in the range version and only one in the non-range version. You are just hiding some of that code in a dynamic function call. Also, your compare_op consists of two <= in the non-range version and an "in" compare_op for the range version (which probably hides the element by element comparison or hash/bloom if it is O(1). Fewer lines of code does not mean more efficient. Regardless of whether it is source code or bytecode.