Best way to handle large lists?

[Paul Rubin]

Sybren Stuvel <sybrenUSE at YOURthirdtower.com.imagination> writes:
> > I don't know enough about Python internals, but the suggested
> > solutions all seem to involve scanning bigList. Can this presumably
> > linear operation be avoided by using dict or similar to find all
> > occurrences of smallist items in biglist and then deleting those
> > occurrences?
> 
> And how would that beat O(n)? Every element of bigList has to be
> scanned at one point, either to compare it to every earlier element in
> bigList and eliminate it, or to compare it to every element in
> smallList.

Maybe the application should use sets instead of lists for these
collections.