On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 5:50 PM, Steven D'Aprano <ste...@remove.this.cybersource.com.au> wrote: > On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:02:02 +0100, Jan Kaliszewski wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> Inspired by some my needs as well as some discussions in the net, I've >> implemented a sorted dictionary (i.e. a dict that returns keys, values >> and items always sorted by keys): >> >> http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576998/ > > > What's the advantage of that over sorting the keys as needed? > > > E.g. > > for key in sorted(dict): > print key > > > works.
Well, it does spread out the cost of sorting the key list over each of the N distinct key assignments, versus sorting the entire list all at once, on-demand at the end of the process. And you avoid having to traverse the M buckets in the dictionary to locate the N keys in the first place. So it has different performance characteristics, which could theoretically matter depending on the use case; e.g. it could avoid a GUI application hanging for several seconds while it sorts a large list of keys. Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list