Lists, tuples and memory.

[Christopher T King]

On 16 Jul 2004, Elbert Lev wrote:

> "Larry Bates" <lbates at swamisoft.com> wrote in message news:<CLednf1kspFPeGvd4p2dnA at comcast.com>...
> > Any reason not to put the words into a dictionary?
> 
> Dictionary has the almost 100 times faster access time theb bisect of
> a list. Build time is about 1 second (very good). Memory consumption
> almost 8 MB - 2.5 times higher then with the list (not too good).
> Unless very fast access time is an imperative, I'd rather not to use
> it.

Try using a set instead of a dictionary. You should get the good access 
time of dictionaries with nearly the low memory usage of a list:

from sets import Set

lstdict=Set([x.lower().strip() for x in file("D:\\CommonDictionary.txt")])

if word in lstdict:
    <do something>

Combine the above with the suggestions to use generators for best
performance.

Also available is sets.ImmutableSet.  I'm not sure if this provides
enhanced performance over Set though.