Oh, thanks. I redid it using xrange instead of range and the numbers went down to an average (over 20 tries) of about 1.36 sec for maxval1 (which computes endp

Oh, thanks. I redid it using xrange instead of range and the numbers went down to an average (over 20 tries) of about 1.36 sec for maxval1 (which computes endpoint within the xrange) and 1.9 sec for maxval2 (which uses variable in xrange.)