python STL?

[Maxim Khesin]

Hi,
being recently introduced to the joys of programming in a powerful 
dynamic language (go snake!) I periodically rethink which parts of C++ I 
still miss. One thing I really enjoy is the generics of C++ - i think 
they are the single strong benefit of a strongly typed system. I was 
wondering about the possibility of implementing STL-like algorithms in 
Python and the one thing that I cannot think of doing without a kludge 
is the object comparsion that so much of STL relies on, which in turn
relies on types and function(<) overloading. Is there a way to implement 
something similar in python (short of multimethods?). How does the 
python dictionary object allow arbitrary key types? Is in internally 
using the references' addresses to impose the tree ordering?
thanks,
max.