I suspect there are many ways to get the dict code to blow up, and always have been. I picked on dict compare a month or so ago mostly because nobody cares how fast that runs except in the == and != cases. Others are a real bitch; for example, the fundamental lookdict function caches dictentry *ep0 = mp->ma_table; at the start as if it were invariant -- but very unlikely sequences of collisions with identical hash codes combined with mutating comparisons can turn that into a bogus pointer. List objects used to have similar vulnerabilities during sorting (where comparison is the *norm*, not a one-in-a-billion freak occurrence), and no amount of slow-the-code paranoia sufficed to plug all conceivable holes. In the end we invented an internal "immutable list type", and replace the list object's type pointer for the duration of the sort (you can still try to mutate a list during a sort, but all the mutating list methods are redirected to raise an exception when you do). The dict code has even more holes and in more places, but they're generally much harder to provoke, so they've gone unnoticed for 10 years. All in all, seemed like a good tradeoff to me <wink>.