Avoid IF statement after condition has been met

Question

I have a division operation inside a cycle that repeats many times. It so happens that in the first few passes through the loop (more or less first 10 loops) the divisor is zero. Once it gains value, a div by zero error is not longer possible.

I have an if condition to test the divisor value in order to avoid the div by zero, but I am wondering that there is a performance impact that evaluating this if will have for each run in subsequent loops, especially since I know it's of no use anymore.

How should this be coded? in Python?

Answer 1

Don't worry. An if (a != 0) is cheap.

The alternative (if you really want one) could be to split the loop into two, and exit the first one once the divisor gets its value. But that sounds like it would make the code unnecessarily complex (difficult to read).