What is the difference between range and xrange functions in Python 2 X

Question

Apparently xrange is faster but I have no idea why it's faster (and no proof besides the anecdotal so far that it is faster) or what besides that is different about

for i in range(0, 20):
for i in xrange(0, 20):

Answer 1

xrange only stores the range params and generates the numbers on demand. However the C implementation of Python currently restricts its args to C longs:

xrange(2**32-1, 2**32+1) # When long is 32 bits, OverflowError: Python int too large to convert to C long
range(2**32-1, 2**32+1) # OK --> [4294967295L, 4294967296L]

Note that in Python 3.0 there is only range and it behaves like the 2.x xrange but without the limitations on minimum and maximum end points.