[Python-Dev] Simple dicts

[Guido van Rossum]

> When I took data structures I was taught that chaining was actually the 
> easiest way to do hash tables and they still had good performance 
> compared to open addressing.  Because of this taught bias I always 
> wondered why Python used open addressing; can someone tell me?

It was my choice, but I don't recall why.  Probably because Knuth said
so.  Or because it's simpler to implement with a single allocated
block (I think I was aware of the cost of malloc(), or else tuples and
strings would have used two blocks.  BTW, why don't Unicode objects
use this trick?)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)