Kottiyath: > How do we decide whether a level of complexity is Ok or not?
I don't understand your question, but here are better ways to do what you do: >>> a = {'a': 2, 'c': 4, 'b': 3} >>> for k, v in a.iteritems(): ... a[k] = v + 1 ... >>> a {'a': 3, 'c': 5, 'b': 4} >>> b = dict((k, v+1) for k, v in a.iteritems()) >>> b {'a': 4, 'c': 6, 'b': 5} The first modifies the dict in-place, and the second created a new dict. In Python 3 those lines become shorter: for k, v in a.items(): {k: v+1 for k, v in a.items()} Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list