Ganesan Rajagopal wrote: >>>>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] com <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > what would be > > the definition of "sorted" and "ordered", before we can > go on ? Sorted > would be ordered by key comparison. Iterating over such a container will > give you the keys in sorted order. Java calls this a SortedMap. See > http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/SortedMap.html C++ STL > map container is also a Sorted Associative container. See > http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/Map.html Ganesan
In Python it's simple to keep a list sorted using bisect.insort. >>> import bisect >>> l=[] >>> bisect.insort(l,4) >>> bisect.insort(l,3) >>> bisect.insort(l,5) >>> bisect.insort(l,1) >>> bisect.insort(l,6) >>> bisect.insort(l,2) >>> l [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] Assuming a list with n tuples, where the first m elements in each tuple is the key, we can also fetch elements through keys (interval matches as well as exact matches) with O(log n) performance. I guess those who thinks this isn't enough should push for placing something like Zope's BTree classes in the standard library. Fredrik already showed how simple and cheap it was to make a dict out of a list. I think this is a superior solution to odicts as suggested, but by all means, if people want odicts, make sure that there is a good implementation available, use it, show that it's useful to others, and maybe, some time in the future, it will be considered for inclusion in the standard library. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
