Yes, "integer compression" as in Unary, Golomb, and there are a few other schemes.
It is known that for large (integer) data sets, encoding and decoding the integers will save space (memory and/or storage) and doesn't impact performance. As the Python dictionary is a built-in (and an important data structure), I wondered if the Python internals used integer compression for the dictionary (especially as the size of the dictionary grew)? Dinesh -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
