On Jul 21, 2006, at 12:45 PM, Giovanni Bajo wrote: > Jason Orendorff wrote: > >>> However, I'm also struggling to think of a case other than list vs >>> deque where the choice of a builtin or standard library data >>> structure would be dictated by big-O() concerns. >> >> OK, but that doesn't mean the information is unimportant. +1 on >> making this something of a priority. People looking for this info >> should find it in the obvious place. Some are unobvious. (How >> fast is >> dict.__eq__ on average? Worst case?) > > I also found out that most people tend to think of Python's lists as a > magical data structure optimized for many operations (like a "rope" or > something complex like that). Documenting that it's just a bare vector > (std::vector in C++) would be of great help.
Indeed, I was talking to someone a while back who thought that lists were magically hashed, in that he did something like: dictionary = open("/usr/share/dict/words").readlines() and then expected: "word" in dictionary would be fast. And was very surprised when it turned out to be slow a linear search of the list. :) James _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com