On 2006-09-28, Sion Arrowsmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > John Machin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>Fredrik Lundh wrote: >>> well, people tend to use dictionaries when they need to look things up >>> quickly... >>... like those paper dictionaries with the words in alphabetical order >>:-) > > ... where you'll notice that the really big ones are divided up > into buckets (which just happen to be keyed on initial letter). > > Truth is that humans are lot better than computers at general > insertion sort, and its lookup equivalent, whereas computers > are much better at calculating hashes. So we each use a > dictionary implementation that plays to our strengths.
Thanks all, for the help. In the end, perhaps prophetically, it turned out my data wasn't really fully sorted after all. I put together a short function to translate my raw data into a dictionary, and that was the end of my problem. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
