Re: [Python-ideas] Associative arrays in hardware

Neil Toronto wrote:

Full-on associative memory wouldn't be necessary. If there were a machine-level instruction in current chips that did a dict-style lookup almost as fast as a base+index*size,

But how would you make it that fast without some kind of associative lookup hardware?

Without that, you'd just be implementing the Python dict lookup algorithm in microcode, which might be a bit faster, but not spectacularly so -- the same number of memory accesses would still be needed.