Hello Thanks Steven for laying out some interesting and compelling points. I concede that my use of this would-be dictionary-name-asking is for the most part useless (i am making a dictionary-editor-viewer in python, and i would like to also be able to display the name of the dictionary at the top of the data tree!) Thank you for giving a pretty good reason why this inverse name-getting (which is really not a true inverse, when none or many names exist) for a dictionary has a poor cost benefit ratio.
However, regarding your comment about the phone book, I have a question: You say: > If you know a person's name, you can look up their number in the phone > book easily. If you know their phone number, it is much, much harder to > look up their name -- unless you go to the time and effort of keeping a > "reverse phone book". By reverse phone book, do you mean something like listing all the numbers in order, so as to optimize searching from phone number to name...and the implicaiton being that for python, it is much faster to find the data structure from the name, than the name from the data structure? If this is true, then you are quite right, and i am quite silly! I guess i was just thinking that all else equal, searching for one side (names) should be as fast as searching the other side (dictionaries), and hence recovering the mappings of name(s) to dictionary is equally fast both ways. If this is not true, then certainly, you are correct in saying that python need not spend its time managing a copious list of names and dictionaries. But does this really entail an overhaul of python to make such a thing happen? Thanks again for the insights, very helpful jojoba o(-_-)o -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list