On Mon, 28 Oct 2019 at 10:01, Steve White <stevan.wh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi Chris, > > I'm afraid you've missed my point. As I said in the initial post, I > have read the documentation. > > I think the documentation does not adequately explain how the > hashtable (or hashtables generally) work internally.
As stated in the docs, "The only required property is that objects which compare equal have the same hash value". The docs do *not* explain how dictionaries work internally, and that's deliberate. You should not rely on the internal workings of dictionaries, because your code may then not work on other Python implementations (or even on later versions of CPython). Of course, if you're only interested in working on CPython, then you can rely on the details of the dictionary implementation, but in that case you;re expected to look at the implementation (and be prepared for it to change over time!) Paul -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
