Whither binary search?

[Sion Arrowsmith]

John Machin <sjmachin at lexicon.net> wrote:
>Fredrik Lundh wrote:
>> well, people tend to use dictionaries when they need to look things up
>> quickly...
>... like those paper dictionaries with the words in alphabetical order
>:-)

... where you'll notice that the really big ones are divided up into
buckets (which just happen to be keyed on initial letter).

Truth is that humans are lot better than computers at general
insertion sort, and its lookup equivalent, whereas computers are much
better at calculating hashes. So we each use a dictionary
implementation that plays to our strengths.

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