Graham> Looking up a key in a dictionary is done in constant-time, Graham> i.e. it doesn't matter how large the dictionary is.
Doesn't that depend on how many keys hash to the same value? For small dictionaries keeping the max keys that hash to the same value small isn't a huge problem. For large dictionaries (millions of keys) might you have some long chains? Or in an effort to reduce the chain length, wind up using so much virtual memory that you wind up wrecking performance by swapping? Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list