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, Python could *scream*. It might work like 80x86's lea (load effective address): hashaddr base, recsize, dictsize, value, destreg It would be very CISCy, and there are a whole host of practical problems dealing with hashing functions, good collision resolution, etc. But any pointer/index-based (e.g. interned string) lookup could go almost as fast as C++'s "this->". Mainstream is moving toward dynamic languages, and it makes sense to support that in hardware. Heck, I hear routers and switches already have things like this. Does anybody have the ear of an Intel chip designer? Neil