Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: > 2011/12/5 Hrvoje Niksic <hnik...@xemacs.org>: >> If a Python implementation tried to implement dict as a tree, >> instances of classes that define only __eq__ and __hash__ would not >> be correctly inserted in such a dict. > > Couldn't you just make a tree of hash values? Okay, that's probably > not the most useful way to do things, but technically it'd comply with > the spec.
That's a neat idea. The leaves of the tree would contain a list of items with the same hash, but that's what you effectively get with a linear-probe hash table anyway. As you said, not immediately useful, but one could imagine the technique being of practical use when implementing Python or a Python-compatible language in a foreign environment that supports only tree-based collections. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
