bob> If you have the same number of entries as buckets, and you have a bob> good hash function, then if you have n buckets your longest chain bob> should have length around ln(n). The average length of a nonempty bob> bucket would be somewhere around 1 1/2.
Yes, and it achieves that nice short chain length by consuming gobs of memory. A dictionary with 10**7 keys is going to chew up lots of memory. There's nothing particularly magical about dictionaries in this respect. They are good examples of a classic time-space tradeoff. Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list