Max M <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The problem is that you don't understand what dicts are typically used > for. Because of the nonliniarity in dict lookups, dicts are used for > optimisation.
To me, dicts are first and foremost used when you want a mapping relationship where the key is not a valid list index (non-negative integer). They are also useful when the key space is very sparse. Imagine I had the following relationship: 1 => "one" 1000 => "one thousand" 1000000 => "one million" 1000000000 => "one billion" 1000000000000 => "one trillion" I could deal with a map that had linear lookup time, but couldn't afford the linear memory requirements. Yes, it's important that dicts are fast, but that's not the primary thing that makes me pick a dict vs. some other container. In some situations, it may be, but not always. I'm a "Get it working first, optimize it later" kind of guy. BTW, when you say nonlinear, I think you really mean sublinear. Quadratic is nonlinear too, but I don't think very many people would be happy with quadratic dictionary lookup times :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
