I just recently revisited the M-Set code from my Perl Snippets post. The code I had was pretty ugly, so I decided to rewrite it in Python. The result is not only a lot cleaner and easier to understand, but it’s also a lot faster:

$ time python mandel.py > \dev\null
real	0m0.051s
user	0m0.036s
sys	0m0.010s
$ time perl mandel.pl > \dev\null
real	0m3.518s
user	0m3.463s
sys	0m0.029s

You can find the code here.

This script works well for zooms, as long as you stay below a few thousand iterations. The following picture was generated with x=-1.1887204, y=-0.3032472, width=0.01 and 150 iterations.